I'm just taking a few minutes on a Saturday morning to take the scalpel to my Google Reader subscriptions.

I actually did a bit of a purge on my RSS subscriptions a few weeks ago, but I've picked up the knife again after a bit of an epiphany during one of my daily browsing sessions.

The realisation I came to was this: most of these blogs are utter shit.

The blog I was reading when this particular lightning bolt hit me was LifeDev one of the myriad 'personal productivity' blogs out there. I've got nothing against LifeDev in particular (according to my Google Reader stats I read 64% of their content), but I had just read the last three articles they'd published and was struck by the sudden realisation that I was, quite absurdly, wasting my time by reading second hand, second-rate content on a site that claimed to help me increase my productivity.

The three articles were:

Facebook Could Be A Killer Productivity App For Web Workers.

Use Completed Task Lists As Motivators Or Artwork.

Great Example of Minimalist Packing.

The first of these articles is based on a post from Web Worker Daily (another site I've just unsubscribed from) and contains this observation:

"Facebook is becoming my de facto way of keeping in touch with literally almost everyone I know"

Now I'm going to be pedantic here for a second and just point out that, apart from being sensationally banal, that sentence makes absolutely no sense. The phrase 'de facto' is not only spelled incorrectly, it's used incorrectly too (I think the author has confused it with 'default') and then that superfluous 'literally' arrives to make things even worse.

But I'm not unsubscribing from LifeDev because of grammatical errors (we all make mistakes, after all). I'm unsubscribing because the content, most of which is based on posts from other blogs (usually ones I'm already subscribed to), has no real value.

Take the second article in that list: Use Completed Task Lists As Motivators Or Artwork.

Again, it's based on an idea from another site and it's just nonsense. "Why not decorate your work space with completed action steps?", well I'll tell you why not: because it's an airy fairy idea with no real merit. It's 'filler' stuff, the kind of thing you'd find in one of those cheap self-help books they stack up near the counters at large chain book shops.

The third article is from Tim Ferriss' rather good blog site (which I'm keeping my subscription to) and does nothing more than summarise the original post, adding absolutely nothing.

Of course, I have only myself to blame for wasting my time in this way. It's not like anyone's forcing me to read these blogs. What I'm a bit worried about, however, is the fact that there seem to be fewer and fewer blogs that are producing valuable, quality, original content. And, what I find particularly scary, is that there are plenty of sites springing up which seek to instruct people how to make a success out of blogs without having to think too much about what they're writing. And these instructional blogs themselves are full of second hand, second-rate content!

This is becoming a self-perpetuating industry which is doing nothing but recycling shit, and that's not what I want blogs to become.