rocketnia, you should really submit your posts here. Don't be shy, it's not like we have a lot to see here. And I find I check Arc Forum a lot more often than Google Reader ^_^
---
It's actually kinda interesting to explore why this is. I have a site as well, but most people don't come there. I need to go where the audience lives: facebook, twitter, G+, arc forum. The readers throng where everybody else is, and where useability is great. RSS promised a collectively-owned common area, but its useability was inadequate. Facebook and G+ have great useability, but it's concerning to give a single entity so much power over our conversations. Is there a way to incent people to build a great experience without owning the venue of conversation?
And why do I not go to Google Reader as much? In the beginning it was because I subscribed to too much stuff[1]. http://readwarp.com has solved that problem for me. Now I only subscribe to low-volume feeds on Google reader; the rest goes into Readwarp so I can sip from it at random. But there's a new problem I'm just starting to grow aware of: even if I have only 10 posts a day on google reader they're all over the map, and the brain sometimes shrinks from the prospect. To go to Google Reader I need to be in an open enough mood. Whereas when I come here (or even when I go to HN) I have a better sense of what to expect.
Interesting post, akkartik. I still use Google Reader and continue to enjoy it so I guess I haven't subscribed to as much as you had. I agree HN and Arc Forum give more focused subjects and primarily rely on Reader to keep up with version updates, and new blog posts by people who I follow who don't have regular new post patterns. That primarily saves me a long list of visits to different places only to discover there isn't any new.
Is readwarp.com something you set up? It looks good.
Yeah, old-timers here know I like to talk about readwarp :) I built the website in arc. (The feed crawling pipeline is in python, primarily so I could use BeautifulSoup.)
