Polyblogging doesn't scale at all. Last week, I was heavily involved with the wedding of two friends and so passed on attending TechEd (and SD Times balked at paying my freight anyway). But, with a Microsoft & .NET Watch due next week (my latest, on Bayesian spam filters, is up), I thought I would follow the action via blogs, which I expected to provide both a spicier and more discriminating sense of the action than wading through press releases. After all, the #1 thing I do at conferences is ask people "What's the best thing you've seen?"
There was even an entire domain (www.TechEdBloggers.net) ~~aggregating~~ providing a unified feed. After an earnest attempt to snipe the interesting headlines, I ended up deleting the whole thing and turning to the more traditional sources for my story. Blogs are enjoyable because they speak with individual voices but there's a tremendous difference between choosing to listen to ten individual voices in ten feeds and trying to parse out individual voices in a single feed, at least when that feed grows beyond a very small number. Like www.blogcritics.org, the degeneration is caused by the very factors that make individual blogs enjoyable: the telling off-topic post, the interpretation clearly based on unspoken biases, the comprehensively detailed analysis, the terse recommendation. >
Individuality is the key to both sides of blogging, writing and reading. Blogs are excellent sources of technical news, a selection of, say, 50-100 feeds can give you as much excellent information as you can handle, but these selections must be your individual choice and the individual posts must be in individual feeds.