This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Follow us on Twitter for more information on our products.

That’s a good question to ask yourself from time to time. I think the way to find out is to take a hiatus. I went off twitter for a month and it worked wonders for my twittering habits!

unplug! unplug!

Choose a forum in each niche you are following. Ditto a few choice RSS feeds.

Mostly just read the titles.

About 1 in 20 titles generate a read About 1 in 5 reads is truly worthy.

Be ruthless on blogs that have low read rates.

The objective is to let others do the in depth scanning for industry info. When a topic arises as pertinent you can focus, drill down and do your homework. It is all about time management. Spend your time on giving back from your area of expertise rather than constantly surfing the broad base.

S

I think you already know the answer.

Design and dev. blogs area starting to follow a really boring pattern.

I’m starting to hate articles of type: “7 wordress themes” or “35 dark websites”, etc.

It’s good for inspiration, but that’s all. I actually didn’t read a good tutorial in weeks…

It depends on just how good you are in filtering the noise.

I’ve read posts like this quite a few times and cannot really agree. If a blog doesn’t post stuff that’s helpful or inspiring and I’m not so close to the author(s) that I’d tell them – I just leave.

For me there are still tons of great resources to read, I just have to sort and refresh every one in a while. Maybe you should consider to do so, too?

How many? I think I can count them all on one hand. Total. Ever.

Greetings,

Follow people who are doing things, not people who are talking about the people who are doing things.

Someone made that comment (paraphrased) on Scoble’s blog…heck, it has to be years ago now, and it struck me particularly hard. Using that scalpel I eliminated Scoble and 90% of my feeds, as NONE of the aggregators I had grown to follow actually taught me anything, they just kept me up to date on happenings and cool-hunting.

Cool-hunting and following the latest happenings is not a BAD thing in moderation, but if what you’re really looking for is motivation to create, and to get better at creating, follow creators.

I’ve recently found the RailsRumble teams are (perhaps unsurprisingly) fertile ground to find blogs of do-ers.

— Morgan

If you actually figure that out, please share.

@Morgan

“Follow people who are doing things, not people who are talking about the people who are doing things.”

Do you follow Seth Godin? I’m curious to know if you consider him as someone who is “doing things” or is simply someone who talks about other people.

Seth Godin is definitively a doer. A small sampling of his successful creations include Change This, Squidoo, Yoyodyne Entertainment. His own successes marketing both his companies and his personal brand makes his a voice not to be ignored in your own marketing efforts.

Rather few, but regrettably, I really do need to read those few. As a result, I’ve become an accomplished skimmer. And I periodically cull the herd of sources I skim.

Damn! I accidentally posted as anonymous coward. That last comment is mine.

I like blogs that give me facts, code or insights that I would otherwise take me a long time to gather or research – these are the blogs that directly affect my work and make me finish my jobs faster and (hopefully) qualitatively better.

Then, of course, are the blogs that simply entertain me or are giving me a good time for a change.

And hey, every once in a while there is a blog entry that manages do meet both – that’s a true gem!!

Cheers, Mike

It depends. Doesn’t 37 Signals post blog posts about their methods and insights? I agree with @Morgan. Sites that go around posting about design trends without adding insights about why these trends are coming about or why they’re useful aren’t going to help you improve your craft. But if someone has done design research or is sharing something that helped them, I think they can be valuable.

Like this one?

All snarkyness aside, I find that about 5-10% of what I read on blogs, etc challenge me to excel, and then about 5-10% of those challenges actually lead to action. (That’s a very rough estimate.) The rest I just find interesting. Not sure if “interesting” can be quantified as something that makes me better at what I do. If I lose interest, it gets removed from my list.

Greetings,

Seth Godin (I knew the name, but had to look him up) is essentially talking about what to do with something once it’s created. It’s incredibly valuable and necessary, but it doesn’t drive ME to create. Others may feel differently.

@Happy – That’s great if you’re a marketer. If you’re a sculptor, reading programmer blogs isn’t generally going to inspire you to sculpt.

And no, to head off a common refrain, not everything that is created requires marketing. I program firstly because I love to program, and I read other programmers blogs because they inspire me. I’ve written vast amounts of code which will never, ever need to care about ‘assigned wants’, or that doing something by rote can be bad, no matter how accurate or insightful those thoughts are.

If you create BECAUSE you want to sell what you’re created or perhaps if you find yourself wanting to sell something you’ve built, you should probably read Seth Godin’s blog (although I’d put Guy Kawasaki higher on that list) because he’s a doer in the space that is important to you.

Right now, I don’t.

I follow SvN because there is, occasionally, enough actual creation being discussed that I find inspiration. And fwiw, my own blog is sufficiently a mishmash of topics that I probably wouldn’t follow me, if I didn’t agree so strongly with myself. :)

— Morgan

Good question to ask yourself and if you are a blogger yourself you should be able to ask yourself about your own blog too.

Exactly my thought last week, and you beat me to it! Well, let’s not be too harsh on bloggers, i think it simply follows the overall interesting/total articles ratio. it’s a bit like reading a newspaper right? maybe 10% of the content is “inspiring” or interesting. but then again, it depends what you are looking for. if you need the latest buzzwords you go there, if you need stats/data, you go there, if you need clever, you there, etc….the problem I have however with techno blogs in general is people don’t seem to read anything else than other techno blogs, hence creating very limited views. I feel the sociological aspect of the web, the cross-cultural, global world element is very seldom discussed. we are too focused on mac vs PC ramblings, not enough on how does it change the way we live, what impact does the web have, and so forth….So yes in that sense, VERY FEW blogs or posts are interesting (and Seth Godin falls in that category – sometime interesting, but too marketing oriented for my taste. which is fine, he is achieving what he wanted to, nothing wrong there) Maybe some of you could recommend me some? I feel SVN is interesting because it goes beyond technology, marketing, it talks about Life, work environment….it talks about humans. most of the time. my 2 cents (sorry for my written english…)

@Gyorgy Funny I just cam across this article: “7 Things Your Startup SHOULD Copy From 37signals” :) http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/10386/7-Things-Your-Startup-SHOULD-Copy-From-37signals.aspx