Sunday seems like a good cleanup day. The yard, the spare room, the RSS subscription list. Think this will be my new unofficial day for cleaning out the RSS cobwebs.

Also, might be a good time to share in detail what types of blogs I look for and read. I’m open to new recommendations for good blogs, so feel free in this thread only to use the comments or trackback to tell me why I should be reading your blog. Don’t be lame and just leave a URL. That will likely be flagged as spam. Tell me something about you and your blog. Copy/paste your about section — you do have one of those, right? But no standalone URL comments.

Really, you can do this any time by simply relevantly commenting or trackbacking on any entry made here and leaving your blog URL in the comments. I do follow those if they aren’t spam and often times this is a good source to subscribe to new feeds. At Hmm we intentionally do not use rel=’nofollow’ but we do moderate first time comments, spam and/or unrelated, crazy commentary. That’s subjective, I realize, but then so is what anybody reading this likes or dislikes.

Awhile back when I asked for a list of blogs authored by women, I didn’t go into too much detail about the kinds of blogs that interest me. The recommendations don’t have to be tech-oriented, popular or even established but in order for me to read and then someday hopefully write about and link to the blogs then they needed to be compelling. I realize that’s a bit vague. In order to learn the kinds of things that interest me, one probably needs to read and follow this blog for a little while. I don’t have just one or two things that interest me, which will be quickly learned by the variance in material posted here.

Now, I haven’t forgotten about you, dear readers, I do look for things that I think you might find interesting too, but in order for me to write anything of any value, it starts with my interest. It has to, really. Not trying to sound selfish but I can’t write anything interesting if I’m not interested.

So here goes a list of criteria in no particular order that delves into my decision making process of whether to unsubscribe or subscribe to a blog. For those already in my 350+ RSS subscription reading list this applies as well with few exceptions:

- I’m not that interested in animals, unless they are 40,000 year old dead animals like this cave bear story.
- Kids and family and What Did I Do stuff might be interesting to some bloggers, but it’s not usually that interesting to me unless whatever you did was something innovative and/or new. A high concentration of blog entries about that kind of stuff and I’ll usually skim or skip those type blogs altogether. I do like to read this stuff once in awhile from my favorite bloggers, just to be reminded that they are in fact human beings, so it’s not that I’m totally down on these type posts, but unless you are a famous person, I probably won’t like a high concentration of that. I unsubbed the dooce blog because that’s all she does, that’s the point of her blog, and even though her writing is often very good, it bored me (sorry Heather). The exception to the What Did I Do criteria is something programming or technology-related. Now there is something I like to read about and will probably be compelled to write about somewhere, maybe even here. I have a daily updated blog like this myself (on PHP scripting). A blog where I can learn something new every day is definitely of interest to me.
- lack of original material and reblogs. I want to read primarily original material, not material recycled or copy/pasted from other sources. If the blog isn’t at least 90% original material, I likely won’t subscribe. This doesn’t mean the blogger can’t include news sources or give their opinion on some piece of technology-related news, after all that’s the focus of blogging, but if the copy/pasted text is more often than not longer than their words, then it’s probably not for me. Remember, most times we can subscribe directly to the content that is copy/pasted, so why should we come to your blog to read one sentence or quip besides a gigantic amount of copy/pasted text? I’m guilty of doing this once in awhile and it’s a bad, lazy habit to get into for bloggers. Readers notice. At least I do.
- writing without wit or passion. Scoble mentioned this one once before and I’m with him 100%. Have some freaking passion! Care about the material or don’t blog it. If you don’t have much to say then either put it on a linkblog, keep it in draft mode until you do have something to say with more depth or don’t blog it at all. I have over 20 posts in draft mode for this blog right now in various stages. This post has been in the draft mode for months, in fact, before I finally spruced it up today and kicked it out.
- catchy, relevant headlines. I know that many folks read through RSS, but I typically just read headlines and snippets in my aggregator, not the full text. This is why I don’t get all up in arms when publishers use full text or partial text; I’ll subscribe to either if the headlines are well done and accurately describe the content. It’s sort of like eBay item titles: authors get 50 characters or so to tell me why I should read their blog entry. If the headlines are boring or nondescript, I’ll either unsubscribe or never subscribe. While on this subject, it’s important to note that as a reader I do not like being deceived. If you use some clever hook to suck me into your blog and then don’t deliver I’ll feel cheated. Do that too many times and to the unsubscribe shed the blog will go.
- size and frequency does matter. Unlike popular opinion out there which suggests that blog entries should be shorter and more in number, I look for higher quality (yes, even longer) and fewer in number. Just please if it’s long break up your paragraphs. There is little worse than looking at and trying to read a long, long paragraph (like this one, ironically). I like Slashdot, Boing Boing, Metafilter, etc but they wear me out with too many stories. If you are going to have a lot of content then please find some way to organize it so that I can filter through it for what I’m specifically looking for (see next item).
- don’t forget the bells and whistles. The occasional podcast, vblog (video blog), screencaps, etc. Here at this blog readers can subscribe to any category or even a set of keywords. This is the type of filtering I look for with blogs that are very frequently updated. Perhaps with more than a dozen entries a day. The reason I say a dozen is that’s about what fits in my sidebar with headlines on a single non-scrolling screen. Any more than a dozen and it requires scrolling, which I’m not going to do very often.

There, I’ve shared some of my criteria and now I’m curious about yours. Why makes you subscribe to an RSS feed? Is it a good voice? Great material? And how often do you clean out the RSS cobwebs?

And why should I be reading (and maybe someday writing) about your blog? I’m listening. Waiting. Remember, no link only comments, use the comment space to tell me and other readers about you/your blog.

• Still looking for more women authored blogs
• How to write headlines even a corpse would read
• Copy and paste through the web
• More blog network negativity circulating over WeblogsInc automated “Best of” posts
• Blog systems and software you’ve tried
• Blog comment spam and SE impact: is it that significant?