Matthew Kahn wonders whether blog reading crowds out book reading. He believes there are two types of blog readers: the nerdy "Wikipedia" types who like variety and suffer from slight attention deficit order, and the "deep readers" who want to dig deep in a few subjects. He speculates that books are substitutes for the Wikipedia nerds and complements for the deep readers.
I read more books since I've started reading blogs. I don't buy more books, but I read more of the books I do buy. I've always bought books on impulse but then let them sit on a shelf. The real reason I read more books now, I think, is that I blog myself. Books stimulate ideas for new posts, of course. But, more importantly, I can only say the same thing a few times without getting bored. I long ago exhausted my own stock of ideas so I have to rip off others'.
What does my blogging crowd out? Baseball. Football. I used to watch two or three baseball games a week. I don't anymore.
Some TV, but, honestly, not that much. My prime TV watching time has always started at 10 pm with the Simpsons. I used to watch TV before 10, but I can't really remember what I watched, so I guess I'm watching TV more "efficiently."
Blogging crowds out some work. I used to hustle harder for new business when I was slow. I haven't sat down to estimate my lost earnings from blogging -- that might make me quit (blogging, that is, not work). Still, work is work; there hasn't been too much to take from there.
I think my blogging has mostly crowded out dead time. I don't know whether I used to just sit around staring blankly at a wall or what, but when I do the math, the time I spend on blogging and reading exceeds -- by a lot -- the time I used to spend on activities since crowded out.
