In my RSS reader, I put blogs in two categories — “must read” and “other”. The former contains a dozen or so great blogs that I try to read or all or almost all posts. The latter contains dozens more blogs that I don’t attempt to keep up with, but just scan randomly for interesting posts.

Even though I don’t attempt to keep up with every blog I subscribe to, there’s still an opportunity cost associated with subscribing to a blog: Doing so reduces the probability that I’ll read an interesting post on another blog.

Thus my strategy is: Subscribe to any blog that looks interesting, but also unsubscribe those that turn out not to be so interesting.

Because it makes you think.

When you write a blog, you need material for posts. You get that by reading other blogs, the news, or whatever, thinking about it, adding a bit of value, and writing about it. Writing a blog gives you a reason and motivation to think about things.

Writing a blog also forces you to think things through more carefully. What you write could be read by anyone, so you need to try not to say something excessively stupid. To sharpen this incentive, you should not blog anonymously.

You also need to think about how to explain your ideas to others. This is much harder than just having some random thoughts about a topic but not putting them into words. As the saying goes, you only truly learn something when you teach it to someone else. You may also get useful feedback from your readers, or from other bloggers, and you can learn something from them too.

I seriously think that almost everyone could benefit from writing a blog about some topic that they know a little about. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time, many blogs get by on one post a week or less. So why don’t you start writing one?

Related: Tyler Cowen on why you should take more photos.

Very loyal reader Chewxy informs me about some analysis by Jakob Nielsen of a study done by some others about web users’ habits.

The headline results for bloggers are: People spend 4.4 seconds per additional 100 words on a page. This means that readers will read about 18% of additional content.

This graph that Jakob made shows the maximum percentage of words that people could read on a page as a function of the number of words, taking account of the average amount of time that people spend on a page given the number of words that it has, at an average reading speed:

Conclusion: If you want to be read by the masses, keep it short.

A new blog aggregator called Shyftr has been causing quite a lot of controversy in the blogosphere, for two reasons. One is that they’re republishing people’s RSS feeds on their own site. All other aggregators that I’ve seen just republish headlines and excerpts. However, if you really want people to come to your site, you can always publish an annoying partial RSS feed. The real controversy about Shyftr is that it’s hosting comments on blog posts on its own site. The blog conversation thus becomes fractured, and blog authors may find it difficult to track comments on their own posts.

In terms of blogonomics, I think this is probably a bad thing. A big part of the value of popular blogs is the conversations in the comments. If the conversations are fractured, the value is reduced, and probably by a disproportionate amount (20 comments all together is more valuable than 10 comments on one site and 10 comments on another). Also, receiving comments is one of the big motivations for writing a blog in the first place. If reading comments becomes a hassle, bloggers will put less effort into blogging and some may drop out all together.

Personally, I’m in favour of aggregators that spread my content, but I would like to keep control of my comments. So I’d be happier if Shyftr sent readers back to the original blog sites to make comments. Shyftr can then capture the comments RSS feeds and aggregate those alongside the post feeds. Maybe this would make everyone happier.

Some other blog posts on this topic:

Shyftr’s lessons for bloggers

What is a blogger worth?

Is content worthless?

See also Felix Salmon on ad network valuations.

If you don’t read Felix Salmon’s blog on Portfolio.com, you should. Not only can you get your recommended daily intake of financial market acronyms in an easily digestible form, you also get Felix’s insight into blogonomics. Today he has a nice post in response to a reactionary article in the NY Times about bloggers having heart-attacks. Basically, as in any other profession, some bloggers are workaholics, and some of them worked themselves to death. Somehow the NYT thinks that blogs are special and this is news.

Anyways, Felix gives some analysis of what really matters in terms of bloggers’ incentives to publish breaking news quickly. As a paid blogger, Felix obviously knows what he’s talking about. Definitely worth a read.