The Last Podcast Opinionated Web 2.0 News and Commentary

It’s OK to Slow Down: There is Always Another Story

I notice a bit of a trend among some bloggers these days where Corvida of SheGeeks is quitting Twitter for a day and Allen Stern of CenterNetworks for a whole week. Both have slightly different reasons for this, but for both, part of that reason is that Twitter has taken too much attention away from other things for them.

I like Twitter (feel free to follow me here), but I’m not addicted enough to it for it to eat a lot of my attention anytime soon.

This does fit in nicely with another trend we have talked about a lot lately and that’s the many discussions about how to keep up with the constant stream of information that bombards us every day.

For myself, at least on the weekends when things are quiet, I have lately moved from quantity to quality. As we read a couple of hundred headlines a day, it is easy to get caught up in the search for the next big story to comment on, the next product to review, the next bitchmeme to bitch about.

Instead, I have started to slow down a bit and actually read posts from top to bottom – enjoying the writing beyond the headline and the first paragraph. As I was doing that, I realized that I had learned more by reading just a few select posts top to bottom than in reading the hundreds of headlines I would have usually skimmed over.

That’s obviously not a good operating mode for news bloggers and I’m not planning on making this my daily strategy, but it’s a nice reminder that it’s ok to slow down sometimes and just enjoy reading something with a bit more time and thought while actually giving my full attention to just one post at a time. It’s not Slow Blogging and I still love the rush of chasing after a story, but there is something to be said for switching out attention away from the constant distraction of all the different services at our fingertips to doing one thing right (at least on a slow day like today).

Slow blogging…that’s an interesting term for it.

I wouldn’t call it slow blogging, more like thorough reading. I usually reserve it for the weekends too, when news is slow. It’s probably the only time that I’m actually hunting for news. It’s good though. I think it balances out the ADHD that blogging is causing me to develop.

You’re totally on the mark.

I’ve started to lean more towards thought posts vs. jumping on the news. As well, I’ve started to write a weekly wrap-up on the weekends rather than trying to jump on the news or what’s hot.

Mark