I read a TON of blogs every day – I love learning from people in the youth ministry trenches, learning from people at the top who give insight into how they got there, even business leaders that share their current learnings. Here’s how I filter them every day, thought it might be helpful to you, too:

Subscribe to a ton of blogs
I pick up a new blog just about every week. I use Outlook 2007 and Firefox Live Bookmarks to grab the content from all over the web and bring it right into my workspace – as of this writing I’ve got 127 blogs that drop content on a regular basis. If you’re not familiar with RSS, basically every site has a pipeline of content that you can “subscribe” to. A ton of people use Google Reader, and if you’re looking for the feed for this site, grab it here. If you stumble on a blog you think you might like – just subscribe!

Delete most
If I’m honest, a quick scan of the title of the articles let me take a pretty good guess if it is worth my time or not. Post titles are KEY, if it isn’t interesting, it isn’t going to be read. I delete about 75% of the posts that come in at this point, really I’m aggressively sifting for the best of the best at this part of the process. I hate to think about people scanning what I work so hard to write and dismissing it so quickly, but the process is ruthless.

Scan some
If the title gets me interested, I’ll give the full article a quick scan. I’m reading the first few sentences looking for the hook, and if it is listed in bullets or points I’m giving them a once over. I delete another 10% of the posts at this stage, continuing to filter the bulk for the select few I’m going to spend time with.

Engage with a few
So now there’s only about 15% of the posts left – and these are the ones I pour over. These are the ones I link to on my blog for others to see. These are the posts that get in my head, show up on Twitter and get forwarded to my team or volunteers. These posts are why I read blogs.

Unsubscribe if there’s consistently nothing I benefit from
It takes me a while, but eventually I might unsubscribe just to reduce the number of inputs in my life. A quick process of elimination usually leaves me with a few great posts to read every day. I encourage you to do the same!

JG