I have 4613 unread posts on my feed-reader (the Flock sidebar). I gave up my feed-reader, along with Twitter and Facebook, for Lent. My mind is boggled by how much stuff I was reading before! That’s well over a hundred posts a day. It’s been a good break – not a total break from reading every blog, just about 95% of them – although it would have been even better if life hadn’t been so busy. Had the strangest holy week ever – but that is a story for another time.

4613!! (blooming ‘eck, I didn’t quite say)

UPDATE: I thought I’d say a bit more on this, following a Facebook question from Archdruid Eileen about how much time it takes up. Bear in mind that a) I read very fast, b) I skim-read vast swathes of posts and c) some of it I only access on my day off. So my concern about it wasn’t about the amount of time it was taking up (maybe an hour a day) it was more about the ‘crowding out’ effect, which I mean in two senses. The first is that by consuming so much information, I wasn’t digesting what I was reading, and I felt that this was unbalanced. The second, linked point is that the time that I was reading blogs was time that I wasn’t reading books. In other words, I don’t think that my time reading adjusted very much between discovering a feed-reader and not, it’s just that what I was reading shifted – away from books and towards the internet. I feel that this is a lower quality diet, so I’m going to change my reading habits – and a great number of blogs (a lot of them church-related) I’m going to quietly drop…