Justin Kownacki, an insightful and geeky blogger, has initiated an interesting project and challenge aimed at bringing attention to our personal information consumption habits with regard to reading and blogging.

It’s interesting because unlike most of the recent challenges to hit headlines, this one seems aimed at helping the reader (should they accept this mission) rather than using them to fulfill some arbitrary and page-view boosting measure of influence, for instance.

A few weeks ago, Ian M. Rountree and I had a Twitter conversation about blogs.  Or, more specifically, about how many blogs we subscribe to but how few we actually bother to read.

Somehow, the guilt surrounding our tower of “unread items” in Google Reader seemed both asinine and counter-productive.

Why do we keep subscribing to blogs (and magazines) that we don’t read?

The premise of the challenge is simple: from Monday, July 19th through Sunday, July 25th, you have to read everything you subscribe to.

That’s every blog post, every magazine article, every newspaper column, etc.

The obvious goal is to end the week with no items left unread.  (Think of it like achieving “inbox zero” for Google Reader.)

The underlying goal is to reconsider what you’re subscribing to, and why.  How much value do you actually derive from what you choose to read?  What would you rather be reading (or doing)?  And are you giving yourself enough time to read everything you actually care about?

The proposition is timely, and falls right in line with the somewhat trendy decision by some to actually end their blogs:

Sam Lessin, the current boss to which I refer, put out a blog post over the weekend entitled “f*ck blogging: my last blog post.”

this blog is over because I believe giving away free content is disingenuous and blogging no longer fulfills my explicit ends.  I am switching to a subscription newsletter.If it is worth it to you, fabulous – the content is going to be very good and very frequent, if not, no worries in the least. sign up for, $1.99 a month. I thought that there was ‘margin’ in the medium… meaning, more people that I cared about read and took blogs seriously per-unit of work/input.  You could free-ride off the fact that a lot of wonderful people have 50 tabs open on their macbooks, and there wasn’t that much interesting being said on the tube. the point — volume should go down, but quality/volume should grow — and hopefully nothing will actually be lost and a lot gained

There were many reasons listed for his blogging cessation, but the key to all of them (I think) was that for him, there was no value in contributing to the commoditization of information on the web when he could derive personal value out of the content creation when distributed to a much smaller and more insular audience.

In other words, it’s not how many people you have paying attention, it’s who they are and how closely they’re paying attention.

It makes sense that if content producers are evaluating their time spent on content production and coming to the conclusion that they no longer want to contribute to the commoditization of content, than readers ought to have that same inflection point.

Here’s Where Reality Clashes with Utopia

The fact is, though, we do exist in a world where content is commoditized. The value of blogging everything that moves for a content organization is no longer a monetizable product so much as a loss leader. You could fund the entire blogosphere with what it costs to buy one newspaper printing press. 99% of the time, it costs nothing to subscribe to a blog or news source (other than your time).

So, in a sense, your Google Reader subscription repository becomes your personal news wire. It’s an information archive. Having the information sources pre-selected and collected in one place is a better version than Microsoft and Google could ever endeavor to create algorithmically with their attempts at a subset of search based on your social graphs.

For instance, if I’m looking for all the coverage within the technology blogosphere on Ondi Timor’s “We Live in Public” movie, as I was a week or two ago, I could do a Google News search and then try to sift out all the mainstream sources and hope it’s repository included all my favorite bloggers (which it most certainly doesn’t), or I could do a quick search on the topic in my Google Reader account, and find all the info I need going back three years.

There is no other toolset that allows you to do exactly that with that much accuracy.

So why unsubscribe when you can organize?

Or more importantly: why feel guilty about an unread count? There are very few dead-tree magazines that I read cover to cover, and even fewer newspapers that fit that description. Why? They’re not organized for cover to cover reading, and there’s no nagging unread number anywhere saying how many posts or articles I’ve yet to read.

Why feel guilty about  that digitally then? By default, Google displays how much you haven’t read yet, but that can be turned off pretty easily. You see that down arrow next to every item on the left hand column? Click it, then “Hide unread counts.”

Done. It’ll still bold up when there’s new stuff, but you needn’t feel guilty about that.

What’s something else you can do? How about aggressive tagging and categorization?

When I started at Mashable, Pete Cashmore handed me an OPML feed of close to three thousand feeds or so for us to use as news leads at Mashable (and contrary to what Marshall Kirkpatrick said this weekend, he wasn’t the only one doing this!).

The first thing I did when he handed me the file was to categorize it into some sort of meaningful list, as it was all in one large unordered list (seen at the left). It was time consuming, but the organizational structure has largely remained intact for the last several years hence.

Mine’s probably not the best, but it works for me. You’ll find one that works for you.

Are you feeling overwhelmed?

This set-up isn’t for everyone. I enjoy it because I’m a voracious information consumer, and I write between 500-3000 words a day, and edit another 10,000 words a day of others’ works. I need to be connected more than most.

If you’re overwhelmed by the noise, by all means, participate in Justin’s experiment. I find value in having information at my disposal that may not have any obvious value at the moment, but may later down the line. You may never have that need.

In my opinion, the axiom is generally true: if you consume less information, the value of what you do consume goes up exponentially (particularly if you self select for quality of the voice). If everyone, or even a movement of a large minority of people, did this, the commoditization effect on content would decrease (or at least slow).

To that end, it’s a valuable challenge to reflect and possibly participate in.

It’s just not for me.