Viewing the internet through someone else’s eyes
A couple of weeks ago I was culling my rss reader. I try to do this on a regular basis for a couple of reasons. The first is that my tech interests change over time. For a while I might want to read a bunch of Rails blogs, and then after a time, I may add a few blogs related to a project I am working on. Some blogs just die. For whatever reason the author stops posting, or the quality goes down. And sometimes, I realize I don’t have time to read you all, and the cruft has to go.
I am using Bloglines, and you can easily spot the feeds you are no longer reading, they are the ones with the (200) beside them. Bloglines will only keep the 200 most recent entries for you, after that it starts to kill off the old ones. I think it’s a sensible default. Frankly I find it refreshing. Most of the time developers are so afraid to make a decision that I would have guessed they would have cached things to a much higher number (assuming that infinity is not an option due to database constraints).
At any rate…Consistently Digg’s tech rss feed would be at 200 entries. I hate the Digg rss feed. It takes you to the comments and not the actual story. Digg comments are unmitigated clap trap. Not only are they particularly bad, they can make me quite angry.
I was getting ready to delete my Digg feed, when Bob suggested I could actually get an rss feed of the stories that he dugg. This was perfect, Bob would be my Mechanical Turk and weed through the crap and then I would see a distilled feed of Digg.
So far it’s been an interesting experiment. I have found a couple of things amusing. 1. Either Bob is too busy to keep up with much of Digg, or there is very little to “Digg” these days. I don’t get that many items in the feed. 2. It often occurs to me that this is largely how censorship would work, except my censor has a particularly bizarre sense of humor and a penchant for articles on alternative energy. 3. I wonder, and maybe Bob will speak up, does he ever think about what he is Digging now, and perhaps, change his behavior, if only subconsciously? I know that if somone were subscribed to my rss feed, I would go out of my way to make the feed really disjointed and fill it will bizarre entries…just to be funny.
As for the latter, I doubt it, however, what if all I could get to on the net were sites previously viewed by Bob (or anyone really, not picking on Bob), would that change the way the censor surfed? I bet it would, I know I would think about my every move online if that were the case.
You crack me up. That was awesome. I’m kind of the same way with Digg, letting Tom send me anything worthwhile instead of going there as often and getting sucked into the comments (though I hadn’t thought about getting a feed of what he diggs, and I’m not sure I’d want to know all of it…). That was deep for a Sunday morning, but fun :)
That’s funny. You would totally hate what I would digg. Funny experiment.
I don’t actually change what I digg now that I know you’re looking at it :) And the sad thing is, I do keep up with digg regularly, and I only digg the stories that I feel should be publicized or bookmarked for my later viewing. Once you weed out the pseudo-news (lab in Mumblania predicts 1TB flash drives by 2012) and the press releases disguised as news (new RAID product lets you access your media from all over the world) and the non-tech stuff (mostly pictures of cats) there’s not a lot left. The site is being taken over by people who have short attention spans.
As for censorship, some day you will miss a news article because I didn’t digg it, and then you’ll rail against the establishment and try to fight the power. But by then, it’ll be too late - you won’t know what the truth looks like anymore. You’ll have to come crawling back to me and hope I digg what you need to know. Muauahahhhaa!