It’s been a little over a week since I started my job blogging for ITWorld.

Today I noticed my XFire Profile:

“This Week: No Games Played” Huh. Now in all honesty this isn’t accurate because I’ve played 8 hours of Too Human on the XBox since I bought it last Saturday morning, but the bulk of that time was on Saturday and Sunday.

I’m finding it an interesting challenge to come up with 1-2 tech-related topics to write about every day. Some days, like when Facebook changes it Terms of Use, the topic is obvious. Other days I have to stretch a lot more.

I feel strongly that this experience is good for me as a writer. It’s enforced discipline to put butt in chair and *write* every day (well, except weekends…my contract only covers week days) and to expand my knowledge of technology, which is one of my ‘natural’ passions anyway.

But in order to feed the muse, so to speak, I’ve had to expand my cloud of Twitter Followees and have added a ton of tech-related RSS feeds to my news reader. My posts tend to be a mix of condensed and regurgitated tech news & research mixed with my opinion, so I need to be in constant scan mode to know what the big story is on any given day. Then I spend a good chunk of time doing the research (sometimes I have to do very little because its something I already am well versed in, other times I have to do a lot) and finally I write my posts.

All this scanning, researching and writing is taking a lot of time, and by the time I finish that, then catch up on all my “personal” (aka, gaming-related) RSS feeds, it was time for bed. Some nights I don’t even get caught up before midnight comes creeping around and then I was starting the next day with a backlog.

So last night I just had to give in and start deleting feeds that I’m not super interested in. Warhammer bloggers, for instance. I’m not playing, don’t plan to go back to playing, and had to make the tough choice to cut people I really enjoyed reading just because their topic was no longer relevant to my life. I feel really guilty about this, like I’m letting friends down, though I know they won’t know I’m not reading them anymore. But *I* know.

So what’s the point of this post? I guess I just felt like I needed to explain why I’m not reading and commenting on your blogs as much as I used to. (Actually, a lot of you might see that as a blessing, not having Pete S gumming up the works all the time!!) It just occured to me, this is a bit like when Ysharros talked about people leaving a guild with no explanation. I feel like I’m leaving a “guild” in a way, and I just wanted the chance to explain why. It isn’t that your blogs don’t still rock, because they do. It’s just a question of a finite number of hours in any given day. By cutting down the number of gaming blogs I read, I hope to free up time to actually do some gaming. I hope you’ll understand this decision.