SecondHand Radio – Dave is The Man

Thanks to everyone who participated (albeit unknowingly) in Freaky Frakkin’ Friday yesterday. I got to chat with quite a few people, though I think that firewalls keep the chat thing from popping up with some people. Nevertheless, it was a rousing success and I’ll be randomly chatting with people every Friday now, and offering random people prizes. Woo hoo! Had a great time talking with lots of folks.

I said I’d be giving 2HT buttons to three people, but I kind of fibbed. I gave away TEN buttons in all because I’m a great guy like that. As I write this I still have a couple hours left to give away the remaining two buttons, but you don’t know that because you can’t read this until…well, now. Until I get my hands on a flux capacitor, of course.

I’m glad that a bunch of you found that “What are Feeds?” video helpful the other day. I showed it to my mom and now SHE’S using Google Reader. Course, she’s only reading two blogs: mine and the Alive Campaign blog (the amazing project one of my daughters is taking part in, riding a bike from TX to Alaska).

Still, two blogs is a start. I think she was surprised to see just how easy it is to use a feedreader. I love getting people turned on to life-changing technology, things that just make life easier.

Now if I could only get people to stop posting excerpts in their feeds instead of the entire posts…*sigh*.

One step at a time, though. I really HAVE been dropping people out of my feedreader for truncating their feeds. No offense, but I just don’t have time to click through to your site every damn day. If you need help listing the entire post in your feeds, I’m happy to help. But I’m definitely going through my feedreader this weekend and dropping all you excerpts-only people.

Some of you have asked what my specific blog-reading habits are and that’s hard to quantify. Like I’ve said before, I have numerous folders set up in my feedreader (which you can do with ANY feedreader out there). Each folder contains a bunch of blogs, seperated by various random categories. The “Folks I Know” folder is reserved for those blogs that belong to people I’ve actually MET. Even if you’ve been a guest on SecondHand Radio, you automatically move to the “Folks I Know” folder.

Exceptions being…I have a TequilaCon folder set up with a bunch of people I met at TequilaCon. They don’t automatically move up to the Folks I Know folder because that would be around another few dozen people. I can’t really explain it, that’s just the way it is.

I have a folder set up for Writing and Design blogs…things related to writing job boards, Wordpress news, shit like that. And the rest of the folders are just ways to seperate groups of people, really no rhyme or reason to a lot of it. There’s also a TBD (to be determined) folder, where I stick new blogs I come across, until I figure out whether or not I want to read them on a regular basis. I used to just add people willy nilly…I’m a bit more discriminating now. I read around 250 blogs, so I’m sure you can understand. If you bore me, I drop you. Harsh? Nah, it’s just survival, baby. Still, I leave people in the TBD folder for quite a while. Everyone has their off days, after all.

The first blogs I read every day are those in the Folks I Know folder. Yes, it pays to meet me. Then from there it’s just moving on to the folders I’ve neglected the longest. I’m almost never fully caught up and I don’t promise to read them all every day. Every other day, perhaps, maybe every third day. Even though I’m not working, there’s only so much time I can devote to reading blogs every day.

Plus, I sometimes have wicked ADD, so I have a really tough time reading ANYTHING those days.

Every morning when I get up, I get my coffee, flip on CNN, and sit down to my computer. I start by reading my e-mail and answering blog comments. Yes, I respond to EVERY comment. I realize not everyone has the time to do that, and that’s cool. My philosophy, though, is that if you take the time to leave me a comment, the least I can do is take time to respond. I used to respond to every comment via e-mail. I stopped doing that when I switched over to Wordpress.

I don’t know why, but my reader numbers have been going up steadily since the big switch last month. I can’t respond to every comment by email any more, but I DO respond to them all in the comments section of the posts. I rationalize that this is just as good because now you can easily subscribe to the comments of any post and get e-mailed the latest comments. That way you can see when I respond to you without physically having to go back to my blog multiple times a day. I’m all about the convenience, people.

Then, I look at all of my incoming links to see if anyone has linked to me on their site/blog. I DO go and personally visit those sites, if for anything to say thanks for the link. I really do appreciate those. Once I do that, THEN I fire up the feedreader and start reading blogs. And I twat during all of this, as well.

There, that’s kind of my daily Net habits in a nutshell.

Let’s talk briefly about SecondHand Radio. It’s that time of week again. If you’ve never listened before, I hope you’ll start. I have an hour-long weekly radio show on Blog Talk Radio. This week, my very special guest is none other than Dave from Blogography! If you don’t know Dave, you must be a trappist monk living without electricity. On another planet.

Dave is wildly talented, a real renaissance man, photographer, graphic designer extraordinnaire, and can drink 20 Smurfs under the table without even batting an eye. True, he generally leaves his clothes ON at TequilaCon, but to each his own. We can’t all be me (thanks be to God).

I hope you’ll tune in live and join in on the fun chatroom. The show starts at 5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific, and you can get the exact time for YOUR location by clicking above on the SecondHand Radio link. You can even set up automatic reminders so you can get an e-mail to remind you of the show time.

There’s a call-in number: 646-716-9370

So you can call in and talk to Dave and I. Ask whatever you want. Ah, who am I kidding? Most of you just want to call in to hit on Dave, but still. You’re welcome to do that.

You might want to show up a little early, even register with Blog Talk Radio if you haven’t done that already. That way people will recognize you in the chatroom. And I’ll also put reminders on Twitter Sunday afternoon, along with links to get to the show.

I’m still looking for future guests, but I have some good ones lined up. NEXT Sunday, June 1, is the amazing Jester from Jestertunes. I’m working on the schedule for future weeks, too, and will post the full schedule when I have things finalized.

Please join Dave and I tomorrow afternoon…or evening, depending on where you are in the world.