When you find a new math blog, do you go back and read its archives?
This was a feasible strategy for me when I only found new math blogs every once in a blue moon, but now that Google Reader is recommending feeds to me I don’t think it’s sustainable. But now I’m wondering if other people attempt this at all.
Annoying Precision 
reading the archives of this blog right now 🙂
Yes, when I’m in a procrastinating mood at least.
I don’t usually read the back posts, but I did for Gowers and Tao. I subscribe to about thirty blogs, mostly math.
This worries me because I produce a math blog myself. So I do the following: Whenever I am writing about something related to something I wrote about in a previous blog or in abstractmath.org, I give a link. I undoubtedly do this too much.
Charles Wells
If I’m in a math blog reading mood and nobody has posted anything interesting in the last couple days, I will pick a blog I haven’t plumbed yet and read to the depths.
Nope! I’ll mark like one or two particularly interesting entries as unread and not read the rest.
Indeed, it isn’t sustainable! I was until yesterday subscribed to 383 blogs (only a small percentage of those being math blogs, of course), which was basically a result of being “seduced” by Google Reader’s “recommendation” feature. Now, I am down to 97 and I hope I can bring it down to a healthy 50 but it won’t be easy. Well, the only advice I can offer is that you may subscribe to as many math blogs as you want, and then observe for a month how many of those blogs you actually read and with what frequency. You will know for yourself which ones you should unsubscribe by the end of that period.
Usually not because there’s plenty of new unread material. Sometimes authors refer back to earlier posts and then I often follow the link.
I used to; now I don’t. It does depend, at least partially, on the length of the archives, which isn’t usually hard to gauge. For instance, if I discovered Tim Gowers’ blog today I’d likely read through all the old posts, but I haven’t even tried to go through the n-Category Cafe or Fortnow’s blog. (Especially with comments…)
That said, I have been going through the back issues of TWF and having a blast, so I guess I really don’t have a hard-and-fast rule for it.
If the title/blurb seems particularly interesting, I will go and read ~2 entries. Otherwise, I wait for the people I already read to recommend good blogs or for friends to share articles from good blogs.