It was the last straw. Any more posts by James Altucher or Aaron Levie and I was going to blow my brains out. Not that they are particularly bad writers, but TechCrunch has become overgrown with these guest contributors and uninteresting posts. I needed a change.
It got so bad that I started to track down old TechCrunch writers to see if they are doing any good writing these days. Now, it may not seem so significant to you, but when I read this from MG Siegler, I think it is on another level completely from these recent TechCrunch posts by Altucher and Levie. To me, MG’s piece is wonderfully opinionated, tells a story and shows some insight. It is long, but I read every word.
So when I read about Pando Daily I knew I wanted to try to cut the cord with TechCrunch.
I use Google Reader to keep up with blogs and I wasn’t going to unsubscribe to TechCrunch lightly. I went back and extracted all the posts I had ever starred in five years of Reader history to make sure I could always go back to the ones I thought were important.
The star information is somewhat interesting in itself. It showed TechCrunch is by far the most starred blog I read.
| Stars | Blog |
|---|---|
| 892 | TechCrunch |
| 537 | VentureBeat |
| 274 | Signal vs. Noise |
| 244 | PhysOrg.com |
| 199 | Xconomy |
It also shows that Sarah just makes the top twenty starred authors from TechCrunch so it isn’t like I have strong quantitative data predicting I’ll get more out of Pando Daily than TechCrunch.
| Stars | Author |
|---|---|
| 136 | TechCrunch-Michael Arrington |
| 130 | TechCrunch-Erick Schonfeld |
| 79 | TechCrunch-Duncan Riley |
| 67 | TechCrunch-Leena Rao |
| 61 | TechCrunch-Jason Kincaid |
| 54 | TechCrunch-MG Siegler |
| 40 | TechCrunch-Robin Wauters |
| 37 | TechCrunch-Mark Hendrickson |
| 37 | TechCrunch-John Biggs |
| 33 | TechCrunch-Nick Gonzalez |
| 24 | TechCrunch-Rip Empson |
| 24 | TechCrunch » Mobile-Greg Kumparak |
| 23 | TechCrunch-Alexia Tsotsis |
| 22 | TechCrunch » Mobile-Peter Suciu |
| 21 | TechCrunch-Guest Author |
| 18 | TechCrunch » Mobile-John Kullman |
| 15 | TechCrunch-Mike Butcher |
| 14 | TechCrunch-Sarah Lacy |
| 13 | TechCrunch-Sarah Perez |
| 10 | TechCrunch-Serkan Toto |
Google doesn’t let me just download all of my starred items back to when I first started using Reader. I have to go into Developer mode in Safari, manually scroll down the list of all my starred items in Reader, and save off all the JSON files that come from Google. Then a simple Ruby script gets me the summaries. Not exactly what I was hoping for in terms of data “liberation”, but at least I could get it.
Update 2012-03-03
The 30 day trends in Google reader show I’m reading over 50% of the Pando Daily posts and over 30% of the News Items posts. My top feed by percentage-read is parislemon at 83%. Pando and MG articles don’t get many stars from me. VentureBeat and Signal vs. Noise keep the top spots there now that TechCrunch is gone.
Qualitatively, I’m happy with Pando and glad to be rid of TechCrunch. I like the short-but-sweet format of the Pando Daily News Items. Pando doesn’t seem to have a bunch of strong voices yet, but I’ve got other sources to keep me going until they grow into that. My main gripe these days is that I have to click through to TechCrunch to read a number of MG’s posts, I wish I could just get them from his blog.
Update 2012-11-07
OK, I’ve ditched Pando Daily as well. I’ve been using Zite for a month now and I really like it. I’m using some of their pre-defined categories and entered some of my own as well. Not ready to cut myself from Reader yet, but we’ll see.