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I used to buy CD’s but now listen to Spotify and Internet radio channels like Limbik Frequencies.

I used to buy comics from a bookstore, but now read Savage Chickens.

I used to order magazines and a newspaper, but now read RSS and blogs and Twitter and… well, the Web.

I don’t try to hide my “killer ideas”, but I spread them to the web and see how people may take them.

I don’t lurk in the shadows saying “I could do that”, and watch others achieve great things. Instead I participate. Thus I don’t even possess ‘jealousy’, that warm comforting feeling, anymore.

“You can buy it for you to own” as they say in the Spotify’s advert, isn’t thing I consider familiar to me anymore. It’s just because I don’t want it to be mine.

So, what other things are still out there not to be possessed?

Yay! Praise the lord, I’m free of the evil curse that I’ve had a while with RSS feeds. I’ve had too many of them in my reader in too many different categories. My fault, yes I know, but now I manage.

Today I just thought to run a routine check of my feeds that I haven’t had the time to read that much lately and guess what? I began to unsubscribe them one by one [no more waiting if someone wakes up and starts them again] and found that fewer folders for feeds can be achieved and the dead ones and uninteresting got to go.

For example, I deleted few folders named ‘Blogs’. It just happens to be, that most of the feeds I read are from blogs. This clearly shows how blogs have truly become the information channel of the Web era.

By the way, yesterday I really wanted to buy myself a good ol’ paper magazine. I went through The Economist, Fortune, Newsweek and Businessweek, and realized that no matter how good these papers are [I especially like The Economist], I didn’t want to buy them because I could read almost all the same things from the Web, and more.

Someone who’s ‘pro paper’ might say that the journalism or writing is better in the magazines. Well is it still, really? If there are dozens of great blogs and free news sites that educate me and make me think out-of-the-box, haven’t they then succeeded in what they supposed to do?

What will happen when more and more people like me realize all this and connect it to their behavior? Do I even have to answer this?

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This week as I was subscribing to my 100th or so blog about personal development, I started to wonder how the power relations between blogs and books will go, and why the sometimes equally good information blogs provide seems like a quick snack to books.

Will you or me recommend a good post we have once seen in some blog, after the post is older than a week, older than a month, a year? I think not. And the funny thing in this is, where does the knowledge of these great posts fade after a while?

But, when you’ve read a good book, you probably recommend it to your friend. And it may be that the book has been written in the 90′s. Maybe in the 1890′s, and the content is still valid.

I started to wonder this issue about time and could it be, that blogs and the internet with its rapid motion could affect to books too?

I’m currently reading an interesting book about leadership by John P. Kotter and when I told about it to my friend, also interested about marketing etc., and mentioned that the book is from the 90′s [1990's that is], he kind of snorted and said ‘Well, there still may be some good information in that’, like implying the knowledge was old.

It’s true that information and theories may get old, but still books by Plato or Toqueville or any other historical writer have thousands of things to say to us. The real knowledge in those won’t get old. People who are even implying something like this should realize that it’s all about applying the writer’s message to the current time.

The basics, the core, of a human being hasn’t changed, at least not that much. And to think, that people who lived in the 1700′s or 1200′s would be somehow more stupid than us, is false belief.

But to the subject again. I don’t know what will become of the blogs. Most likely blogs like this, if I stop writing it, will eventually fade away, drown underneath the information flood and nobody reads them in the following years.

What I’ve watched from the stats, almost no one is interested about posts older than 2 posts back, unless I’ve made a reference to them somewhere, either in my own post or someone else’s blog.

This was so clearly the case when I commented a post in Jari Parantainen’s Sissimarkkinointi blog [only in Finnish, sorry]. My post about using personals blogs as a marketing tool for companies, suddenly got a large boost and have been the most read post ever since.

This fading of older posts is sad in a way, and I see that this kind of behavior is the case with myself too. I rarely read post archives, but I read books written a long long ago. Why is that and why it seems that the old posts lost their meaning, or are not ‘interesting’ anymore in the long run?

Of course there’s the thing that in books the subject at hand is often processed more thoroughly and longer than in blogs, and maybe the writer has more credibility as her book has been published by a publishing company and he’s not just another self made philosopher.

This is often a problem for me when reading those ‘personal development’ blogs. I feel they can offer comfort and cheering up, but often they are written by a layman and you’ll never know how much the blogger has really processed the things he or she writes about or if they are just repeating what others have said.

In this kind of thinking, ‘is one a reliable writer or not?’ or ‘who really has something relevant to say and who doesn’t?’, may also be changing: writers aren’t ‘writers’, they are normal human beings and thus saying a blogger is somehow more unreliable than a real writer with published paper book is from the old times. Now everyone can have a voice, anyone can be a thinker in the web, if they choose to. Of course sensorship can sometimes still be a problem, even in the Web.

This makes you think that could it just be that ‘blogging’ is the new ‘writing’ in some form and a ‘blogger’ is the new ‘writer’?

But sometimes it just feels that reading a blog is like eating a snack, and when you want to enjoy a long lovely meal: you’ll read a book. The snack can be really good, but they don’t fill you completely; you need something more sturdy.

I wonder where this is going to lead, when in some time in the future all the generations have been born in to the internet age where Information is just waiting for your attention on your browser, most likely from your mobile device that is always with you; but the information is short, compressed and fast to internalize.

It seems that this ended to be a very long post – most likely the form is too long for a blog post, but what the heck, I do it for myself in the first place.

This matter is such a huge philosophical whale that I don’t believe I can totally comprehend it or most certainly can’t make any end statements of it. I can only make those obscure reasonings and hide my small capability of understanding behind it all.

I found this site Alltop which is a portal to blogs, through one of my news feeds I like to read from chrisbrogan.com, and now I feel excellent and think that the whole concept of social web is absolutely magnificent and will make the world a better and more informative and open place.

So, why I now think blogs are good?

The biggest reason is, they are mostly of something specific and they have been written by an individual interested on that specific area. OK, that’s not always 100% true, everyone has heard about the casual fake bloggers working in an advertising agency and keeping a blog for the wrong reasons. Luckily people are sometimes smarter in the web and mostly in these cases evil-doers get caught right in the start.

When a person starts to write voluntarily about something, anything, you know he or she must be interested in the subject. Because, let’s face it, although it may be somehow easier to write to the web and the word count is often smaller than in the average high school essay, writing is still a thing people begin to do if they are honestly interested in something and want to express themselves. And writing is, in a way, hard to start, especially if you are not writing in your mother tongue. So most likely if one starts and even continues, there are real reasons behind that.

One other good reason is that blogs benefit fast and directly. I have noticed, that nowadays I’m almost always searching some particular piece of information, and the blogosphere is often a better and more ‘to the core’ type of place to find what you are looking for, opposed to for example commercial search engines. When I find a blog that deals with the things I was looking for, there’s almost always some good links forward to explore more on the subject. And if the blog is well-made, the connected sites (or blogs) are also good and informative.

And about the subject I last time wrote (i.e. nagged), that you don’t have the time to read all the interesting blogs and feeds and stuff you would like to. Well, deconstruct, deconstruct and deconstruct my friend. And stop whining. Try out those feeds you are reading for a week or two. If you see the numbers increase in the ‘unread posts’, delete it. If you are not reading it, it most likely stands for “I don’t need it that much”. There’s plenty of better sources out there. Don’t get stuck to something you don’t need. Find another, better one.

And in the end, where the people should get their subjects and ideas for their blogs? From other people of course. Unless you are a genius of some kind, and not likely in that case either; human beings don’t work in a void. People don’t get ideas from the thin air. You search, you talk and listen, you process. And sometimes, when its too much to bear to keep it just for yourself, you execute.

Like my favorite writer from my childhood, Stephen King said,

I found this site Alltop which is portal to blogs, through one of my news feeds I like to read from chrisbrogan.com, and now I feel awful and think that the whole concept of social web should be shot down. I think that tomorrow I’ll already be feeling a lot better.

I’m currently wondering where does this all end, this blogging thing? This ‘follow me in Twitter’ thing. When every person has their own blogs (in some cases several), who will read them all and are they the dominant information channels of the future? Or is it like with the first crush: will it gradually slow down to a more mature way of love, which mostly lasts longer and feels more stable? Sorry ’bout that folks: just bought ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Mr. Wilde and I’m unfortunately spellbound by its language.

Well OK, not everyone’s going to write a blog, but there are a lot of blogs out there already and I believe it’s still dawn of the socialized web revolution. Midday at best.

Will the basic blogs eventually change to something else? Will groups of bloggers then build communities that grow to become web portals that change to become something else? And will there then be ‘guerilla’ bloggers who want to keep their own unconditional voice – or will there ever even be the change to loose the voice again? Will there be a circle in the progress – it goes backwards somehow?

There has always been an evolution in things. That’s the one driving force we humans possess. There will be evolution in these thing too.

Then there are people who have to work. I’m one of those. Professional blogger is an intriguing profession in my mind, but I don’t think that I could be one. It really takes a lot time to write good posts, and you have to maintain the pace or goodbye AdSense made revenue.

I’ve subscribed to many really interesting and great feeds. I read them so much that I sometimes get laughed about it at home. Sometimes when I’m subscribing (again) to a new great blog, I’m thinking, ‘well, do I really have the time to follow this too?’.

Sometimes when I’m ‘reading’ my news, I suddenly realize that I’ve just scrolled down to get the numbers of the unread posts down. That isn’t educating anymore, something has to go. Maybe the principles of deduction could help to find the thoughts with real value beneath the tide of mediocracy and thoughts with no relevance?

And surely I’d most definitely would like to write myself more, than spend all my days reading what other people have written about. But there’s soooo much interesting information to see. There must be really distressed people out there in the web when you think of the information flood that’s coming out from one’s internet connected devices.

Maybe someone is reading this post and beginning to feel the same way too.