Not necessarily in real life, but what sites/journals have you stopped reading recently? And what has really captured your attention?
I stopped reading the two journals because they were self-pitying and/or obsessive. My blood pressure went up just by reading them. I have also reduced my visits to good ol’ Ars Technica because their news items haven’t caught my interest in about a month. The Lounge, which is my favorite forum, has been packed with whiners or tragedy. There was a great discussion about Spiderman vs. Wolverine, conducted in the best geekery possible, but there haven’t been the “laugh out loud and pass along to my friends” tidbits like the past. I’ve also stopped visiting Meghann Marco’s site (author of Field Guide to the Apocalypse) because apparently she got a real job. :smirk:
Predictably, I’ve been reading the FZ6 forum over at sportbikes.net. The traffic isn’t nearly what I’m used to, so I could visit a few times a day and not see any new posts. I also returned to Friendster not too long ago after my friend Gary realized it was the only way he could successfully contact me. But again, Friendster isn’t something one would check regularly. Unless you’re stalking someone, that is.
What’s caught my interest? World of Warcraft has dominating my browsing habits AGAIN. I spend most of my surfing energies looking up quests, items, reading about the classes I play, and scanning the server board to see if my hijinx have caught anyone’s attention. I wouldn’t call that “new hotness,” but that’s what’s loaded in Firefox most of the time.
So, what’s in YOUR wallet?
I broke up with a guy I’d been dating and quit reading his journal. IRL, he didn’t have much to say and he said even less in his journal. Ho freaking hum. I hang out frequently on a private HD forum, with fewer than 200 members. We all know each other, meet IRL at HD gatherings and so on. So, I’d say the net is a way for me to keep up with folks I meet IRL, more often than not.
I left my LJ id in my other pants pocket. le sigh
On my links page under Daily Sites and any web comic with a predicted post rate pretty much covers my daily browsing habits. This year I have jettisoned: CNN (most of the stuff I cared about I had seen elsewhere or linked to CNN), NY Times (same not to mention the free registration ickiness) Make Magazine (didn’t update enough for my over eager clicker).
One of these days, I might start using RSS to cover more ground. I still feel right now that leaving a tabbed window open and reloading the sites has roughly the same effect.
Scarily enough, I try to spend most of my personal life off-line. My standard on-line reads are all related to work (I won’t bore you with them) and I haven’t dropped any this year. I did add a few, but have not made them quite a habit as yet. I guess the only thing I added that wasn’t work-oriented was my LJ ;-) which I really don’t update nearly often enough!
I’d say the on-line/off-line split was generational (I’m just sufficiently older than DrFaulken), but jaine_parr is my age and she’s totally into the geek toys, even if I was a professional geek before she was.
I’ve started to check Connotea.org near-daily (recent links and popular links). I have a lot of RSS feed subscriptions via LJ, and some friends on my other acct. do a lot of news/news of the weird links (I never read ‘em all, but they’re there to follow if I want).
I got an account on Wikipedia.org Thursday b/c I was going to add a page I noticed they needed, though I haven’t followed through yet (their guide says content is better than no content, but then asks for cites and has style notes I want to read). Still, if you’re getting bored just reading, you might look around for a construction activity like that (not necessarily Wikipedia). Or maybe I’m just high on community projects and care and feeding of the Commons right now. :-)