In spite of Twitter capturing more and more of my attention i am still reading lots of blogs. The pattern has shifted though. I used to read them only via google reader and netvibes. in a clean and uncluttered environment.
But with twitter i am flowing with my followers and read on the fly when i see a good link. Which points to the browser
One thing i have noticed with all major blogs.
Blogs are becoming impossible to read.
Blogs used to be lightweight and fast to load publication platforms but are today, years later, real media formats with complex CMS, tracking codes, advertising snippets wrapping the content.
It takes no less than 5 to 10 seconds for a page to load (at least on my Chrome browser with decent connection) and the pleasure of reading blogs is faded by the cascade of probably useful for the editors/owners but useless for the reader - pile of code.
In addition more and more the content itself takes a smaller part of the page, which makes the page looks like more a christmas tree for advertising.
Not mentioning that getting to the comments is also painful
This is why i believe blog readers are still and will still be popular. They provide a clean experience, although nothing great for reading comments.
I am missing times where it was great reading Techrunch, Readwriteweb and Gigaom on the browser. I love this blogs, but i much prefer skipping reading for later rather than going straight to the news.