This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz
by Michael Cote.
Original Post: My Content Intake: It's All About Bookmarks
Feed Title: Cote's Weblog: Coding, Austin, etc.
Feed URL: https://cote.io/feed/
Feed Description: Using Java to get to the ideal state.
Recently, I've shifted my content-discovery process (how I find good links) from looking through lots of blogs, news feeds, etc. to looking primarily at people's bookmarks.
Too Many Feeds
I subscribe to about 380 feeds in bloglines. This isn't the Scooble 1,000+ level of feeds, but it's still damn plenty. In truth, I only keep up with a few of those feeds at any reasonable frequency, checking those more than once a day. These feeds are either (1.) my own feeds, (2.) photo feeds (they're quick to page through), (3.) feeds of my friends (meat- and virtual-world), and (4.) other people's bookmarks.
The last one -- other people's bookmarks -- is the one I've been discovering the most content from recently out of all the feeds I subscribe to. It's like a poor man's attention.xml.
The Full Blown Attention Feature
I say "poor man's" because it's not automated. In my conception of attention.xml, you setup your aggregator, your email, IM, everything, to start logging all the things you pay attention to (sites, people, etc.), and you somehow setup filters to publish all that stuff online. Then, you get the whole swarm of other people doing this and, after much hand-waving, you're suddenly getting recommendations and suggestions for other links and people you'd be interested in. And it's all automated! Hey-Presto!
Bookmarks: Sucking Value from Constraints
del.icio.us and other bookmarking apps, of course, doesn't have this whole automated angle. Instead, if you want to bookmark something, at the very least, you have to manually click on something and then click save. (Wouldn't single-click bookmarking be the fuckin' bomb? Hopefully Amazon hasn't patented that one yet.)
All this extra work is what you might call a limitation or a constraint with using del.icio.us. But, in the right hands/mindset, from constraints come software-value: the cost of bookmarking is high enough that you have to really think something is worth bookmarking to do it. It's not "free," so the the URL you're saving has a higher amount of value than any old thing you look at.
So, the links people bookmark can be considered to be more valuable/interesting than the average link. Thus, as a content-consumer, I can subscribe to someone's bookmarks and be confident that the links I'm consuming are valuable. That is, I can use people's bookmarks as a filter for high-value links.
E.g.
For example, all the tech-news feeds I subscribe to spit out about 50-200 items a day. I might read 10-20 of those in-depth. But, only 2-5 of them may be valuable enough for me to "spend" the effort to bookmark them. So, people who're consuming my bookmarks could, if they trusted my judgement, ignore all the tech-news feeds and just cheery-pick the interesting links out of my bookmarks. The same works for finding interesting blog posts: I found that lovely story about IBM that's been floating around in someone's bookmarks.
Good Enough Attention
So, for me, the whole attention problem is solved with del.icio.us links. Once again, the dead simple concept heals up a long oozing sore; the only cure is more good enough software.
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