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by Weiqi Gao.
Original Post: Blog Reading Considered Harmful
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If you are reading this blog entry because some notification icon just jumped up on the lower right corner of your computer screen and you clicked on it to bring up your blog aggregator, stop reading right now.
A recent study by the Washington University Medical School's psychological team has concluded that blog reading is an addictive behavior. They have observed all the classical symptoms assiciated with addiction in avid blog readers. The effect is the most severe in the 25-45 age group. For one group of study subjects, blog deprevation caused headaches.
Like all addictive behavior, blog reading progresses from the light reading of about 10 blogs to more reading more and more blogs and at a more and more frequent intervals. The most severely affected go for their aggregators once every three and a half munites.
The researchers tried some of the most common treatments for blog reading addiction, and found the traditional method lacking in effectiveness. A famale subject became violent during the cold turkey treatment and smashed the computer monitor. Another subject, who's normally calm and collected, experienced a sudden behavioral change and started doing the Numa Numa dance.
There is hope however, according to the lead researcher. Some of the non-traditional treatments are showing different level of effectiveness:
Blocking RSS traffice at the firewall level turns out to be an effective treatment of blog reading addiction.
Voluntary counterdose, where Java blog readers were given links to PHP blogs, Republican blog readers were given Democrat blogs, etc., takes the edge off the withdrawal symptoms.
Blogshock, where the subject were forced to read 10 to 100 time more blogs then he normally read, is also effective.
The bese medicien is prevention, said the lead researcher. Don't let blog reading take over your life to begin with is the best strategy. Some suggestions for moderation are:
Create a blog reading routine where you read blogs only at a specified computer, hopefully a home computer.
Set the feed polling schedule to once a week or less frequent.
Reading a balanced diet of blogs, for every Java blogs you read, also read a PHP blog. Similarly for Republican/Democrat blogs.
The researchers call for the blog writer community to put their technological or political agendas aside and form bounded pairs of bloggers with opposite views and advertise their opponents feed on their blogs. "This is for the common good of all humanity." proclaimed the lead researcher.
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