Note

This blog has moved to http://street-level.mcvmcv.net!

Curating

One possible way to make this blog good would be to make every post an extension of the first, and it would form a collection of thoughts about blogs and blogging.

I use Google Reader to share certain items in my RSS feeds. The process is simple: let’s say I read an interesting item in the Guardian Unlimited Football feed. If I click ‘share,’ it gets marked as one of my ‘Shared Items,’ which changes nothing about the display of this item in my Reader, but adds it to a list—or collection—of other items that I have marked as ‘Shared.’ That list of items, in turn, gets its own RSS feed, so anyone who subscribes to my Google Reader Shared Items will see the GU Football item in their feed reader.

This is exciting to me because it’s a form of instantaneous, perfect blogging. As I said, the blog is a perfect collection. The Shared Items feed is nothing but a collection in RSS form. Sounds like a blog to me. Anyone who subscribes to a Shared Items feed knows that each item is selected, or curated—by a real curator, no less!

We need more people to do this, so we don’t have to do as much work to get our information (i.e. Erlebnis). When I share an item about the Carlos Tevez transfer saga, I've saved you the work of trawling through the Guardian's football feed to find that interesting story. You have to trust that I'll only share the best of the best, but chances are you probably don't care about that anyway, and you can gloss over that item in less than a second. I still get the pleasure out of curating a the item for myself, so everyone's happy.

(In the world of technology, the revolution is always getting dumped for something hipper.) Join the Google Reader revolution!

2 comments:

Peter Robinett said...

Have you checked out AideRSS? It is supposed to automatically filter your RSS feeds and tell you what are the most interesting/important posts.

Dan said...

This is interesting, but it's precisely what I don't want! I want to read a feed curated by a person, not ranked by a machine. I'm sure that the service works, but it's entirely possible (in fact more likely, I'd say) that I'll be more interested in a scrap of information that someone else recognizes as important rather than the "big" story.