slowly wading back into the blogosphere
In the past couple of months, I've wasted far too much time hitting the reload button on my my Flickr page to count the number of views each photos is getting and reloading my LJ friends page to see if there are any updates. Part of this is probably psychological in nature, whether it be my being too depressed to be more productive or being addicted or whatever.

But I guess this is also an indicator that my courseload isn't as bad as I intiially thought and I actually do have some time to spare this semester (and indeed, I have taken on a bigger workload at the Spartan Daily). So I've decided to put this time to better use by getting back on top of my RSS feeds. I used to stay on top of a large number of political and economics blogs, all of which went by the wayside at the beginning of the year, partially because I decided not to read these things at work anymore when I shifted to part-time. And partially because my feed-reader was MS Outlook-based, which I just don't use that much anymore now that I rely on Gmail.

So I've finally resurrected my Bloglines account and have loaded up a bunch of subscriptions. So far it seems to be working. I'm spending a lot less time reloading those same pages over and over again and am instead reading a lot more and keeping up on current events. Indeed, I'm also commenting a lot more again on other blogs. I used to be ridiculously prolific in that respect to the point that I started using the del.icio.us social bookmarking service to track my comments on various blogs to check back for replies.

I hadn't done so in a while because most of my comments lately have been on LJ, which notifies me via e-mail of replies. But I've made a bunch lately. Interestingly enough, I was at del.icio.us's 3rd birthday party at Yahoo! tonight and mentioning this practice to somebody (Kevin maybe?) who thought it was interesting. I even chose to publish a few to the sidebar of my long-neglected "real blog". Perhaps I'll come across a blog post that pisses me enough that a mere comment will not suffice and I'll finally be motivated to write something substantive again.

Getting back to the RSS feeds, I also subscribed to the feed of all the updates on my Vox neighbors page (their version of LJ's friends page). Now, I know that LJ publishes an RSS feed of every journal, but does anybody know if they publish one for the friends page? My understanding is that they do not. That would be annoying.

Given that advantage for Vox (along with its oft-mentioned ease in integrating photos and music into posts), plus the fact that Vox has fixed my one major complaint with it (failure to render HTML), the main things holding me back from switching is 1) inability to import my old LJ posts (which I think is only a matter of time) and 2) I know more people on LJ.

Hmmm. I have 2 Vox invites available. Anybody interested?