The Freak Parade

Davy Brion recently posted about how he’s trying to ward off the fire-hose-in-your-face-while-you’re-trying-to-work effect of social media by replacing a large feed list with a (very) small set of link blogs. While that sounds nice in theory, and I can definitely relate to the urge to push the fire hose out of my face, I don’t think it would work for me as a turn-key solution. For one thing, the link blogs don’t cover all the bloggers I read, and for another I just hate to bank on the coincidence that one of the several .NET link bloggers will take a fancy to the same content I am interested in day in and day out. I routinely read posts in my reader that don’t end up in the link blogs.

One particular thing about link blogs, though, that generally doesn’t live up to direct subscriptions, is that the link blogs are usually just a long list of links - if I want a quick idea of what the post will be about, I need to click the link, which either takes me out of my reader and into the browser or changes the context of my feed reader from which I’ll have to back out to get back to the link list. If I get the feeds directly, I can read the first few sentences of the post directly in my reader and get an idea what the post is about, and if I should save it for later, read it right away, or let it slip on down the river.

Recently, though, I noticed my favorite link blog, Interesting Finds by Jason Haley, starting coming in two flavors - a “rough cut” version and a “final cut” version. The rough cut version is the usual long list of links. Then, a little later in the day, a “Final Cut” arrives - an attractively formatted subset of the rough cut with a short summary of the items! And pleasantly enough the items he chose to summarize were the ones that caused me to think to myself “hmm…wonder what that is about?”. Bravo! And I love that he’s publishing both versions, and not just switching to the final version only. Of course, it adds TWO points to the oppressive “unread item” count in my feed reader every day instead of one, but in this case it is well worth it. I’ll probably read the “final cut” first, only clicking on items I can now confidently be sure will interest me, and then skim over the “rough” cut very quickly, looking for things not covered in the final cut but that still might catch my interest.

I honestly can’t imagine how he has time to go to this kind of effort every single day, but I certainly do appreciate it, and I hope the two editions are a permanent feature of his blog as they more than double its value (at least for me).