TKP Has a Blog!

I wasn't going to even post today, but The Kindness Project Blog (link is also permanently in my sidebar, under Group Blogs) has launched, and I want all of you to go follow it, STAT. Sure, my Google Reader and the Blogs I Follow in my Blogger Dashboard still seem to be broken, but I'm sure they'll fix them eventually, so I haven't stopped following blogs.

You shouldn't either.

That is all.

Why Follow?

It's Friday. For my final post in my series on following I'm going to keep it short.

I just wanted to share some thoughts on what following means, why I do it, and how I go about reading blogs.

What does it mean when I follow you? It's a bit like a promise. I don't follow people arbitrarily, just hoping that they'll follow me back. I don't follow blogs that aren't about writing and publishing (unless they're really funny). Anyway, back to that promise. What I mean is that I follow a blog, because its content interests me, and relates to my own writing career and feeble attempts at achieving publication, and when I follow, it means I promise to come back.

That doesn't necessarily mean every day. It doesn't necessarily mean tomorrow. There are blogs I read every day, without fail. And even one I check on weekends, when I can. It does mean that I will be back. I wouldn't take the time to follow if I didn't want to come back.

When I read blogs every single weekday, I have a method. There are a few blogs I load up every morning, because I know they post daily, and I consider the people who run them good friends of mine, and I care what they have to say. I load these blogs from the links I keep on my sidebar. When I'm done reading them I go to my blogger dashboard, and check the rest of the blogs I follow to see if they have posted something new. I do not open every single post that comes up in my dashboard. I read posts that have interesting titles or pictures, or seem relevant to a current trend I'm curious about.

If a blog doesn't post something new between about 5 AM Eastern and around 11 AM, I am highly unlikely to ever see it. That is my blog reading time. If you want me to read your blog, you should try to post sometime during that time.

Now this is starting to come off rantish, and that wasn't my intent. This is just the way I do things, and it certainly doesn't mean that everyone has to do it the same way.

How do you go about reading blogs? What makes you decide to follow a blog? What keeps you from following a blog? Do I make any sense, ever?