Last week I wrote about the sort of blogger I am and that got me thinking about the sort of blog reader I am. Bloggers are never just writers and content creators, we are also readers and consumers of content. We don’t – or shouldn’t – operate in a vacuum. Ideas about what to write take form from other sources. At least, they do for me.

I subscribe to a lot of blogs and manage them all via Google Reader, categorized according to what they are about. I find it easier to catch up on my reading this way than to go back and forth between various sites. Everything is nicely accessible in one place. On any given morning I have upwards of 150-200 posts to read. I don’t really read them, though. I mostly just skim through the headlines, and the first couple of paragraphs. Anything that catches my eye in that process, I read “properly” and anything that I think others might like I share on Twitter.

I have a category for bloggers I “know” and it is this category that I generally read properly rather than skim. These are people I know personally, or interact with regularly on Twitter, or who are regular visitors here and comment regularly. I like reading these blogs because of the personal connection I have with each of the writers.

I am fortunate in that I have a number of people who generously comment regularly on what I post. And I like to talk back to readers when they comment. In my opinion, there is nothing worse than making the effort to comment on someone’s blog and then not getting a response from the writer. How rude!

However: that’s not to say that I comment on other people’s blog often. It’s actually quite rare for me to do so, mainly because my Google Reader set-up on my iPhone makes it just that more difficult to do so. But what I do is tweet* the blog link to my Twitter followers and Facebook friends, which I can do very easily from Reader. It’s my way of saying: “Hey! I really like this post. And while I haven’t left a comment, I have told my Twitter followers/Facebook friends about it and I hope this drives some traffic your way.”.

So this post is therefore twofold: I want to say thank you to all my readers and subscribers and to thank those of you who regularly leave comments. I wanted to also say that just because I don’t leave comments on your blog does not mean that I don’t care about you and what you write.

I want to let you know that I try to reciprocate in my own way, even if it’s not a “direct” contribution.

*I have automated the tweeting of links from Google Reader as well. I use ifttt and to do this. Basically, any post that I “star” gets posted to Bufferwhich schedules a tweet. This way I don’t spam people’s Twitter feed with lots of links all at once.