You all know me I spend a lot of time online and on a daily basis I probably read the equivalent of 3 or 4 newspapers with all the various reading I do. Aside from my sites, I visit about 8 or 9 forums every day although I only contribute to about 2 or 3 it’s still a lot of reading and writing. I track many blogs via RSS, my feed reader lists over 90 subscriptions to be sure not all are posted to daily but some are high traffic and get 30 + posts per day and most of it I just scan through titles to see if anything interests me. If don’t read my feeds for a week on Saturday I have over 1200 new items. 
I’ve found that a lot of it is just plain noise. That is stuff I don’t need to know or am not interested in for one reason or another. A few of the feeds I subscribe to are aggregator feeds, that is they pull feeds from a number of sources and incorporate them into their own feed. Planet Ubuntu is one of the aforementioned aggregated feeds. Now I’ve picked up many great Linux tips from Planet Ubuntu but still the signal to noise ratio for me is probably 1:20. That is on average I find one post out twenty useful. Lifehacker is probably about the same for me.
One thing I found myself literally wasting time on is reading comments on blogs. I’ve literally lost an hour or two just reading comments that had absolutely no value to me. Now please don’t get me wrong sometimes blog or news site comments are good and useful but most of the times I actually feel stupider for reading comments. Sites like Youtube, Lifehacker, Slashdot, Digg, etc all seem to have some of the most juvenile comments I’ve ever read and I feel dumber for reading them. A couple of the marketing blogs I follow like Shoemoney seems to have a bunch of commentors that are so far up the owner’s arse they mise well just bend over. Shoemoney is obviously a very successful internet marketer and I’ve picked up some good information from his blog but some of the commentors bow to him like he’s a God and I cannot stand reading it; Matt Cutts blog is the same way too at times. Get over your man crush and add something useful!
I found that multi-authored business oriented blogs tend to have the best comments. Forums often have a much better signal to noise ratio. Blogs are more broadcast oriented where as forums are conversation oriented. I’ll give you 10 to 1 odds that any forum trafficked by adults has more productive comments than any blog. Blogs tend to be more ‘clicky’ where as forums are more open to new members and conversation.
In conclusion, I’ve pretty much completely stopped reading blog comments unless it on a topic that I’m very interested in. I read more on forums and less on blogs these days. I’ve shaved about 2 hours off of my daily reading time. What are you reading habits online?
