Vintage Kottke: A Visual Metaphor for the Web
There is nothing quite like the human touch.
RSS may not be dead (just ask its inventor, Dave Winer) but I have a reader that I haven’t opened for a month with over 10,000 articles I haven’t read. I find great value in those intrepid people or websites who do the hard work, sifting through the chaff to give you the best of the internets. The type of aggregation matters (for a primer on the different types of aggregation check out this Howard Owen’s blog post). While I admire the algorithms at work in something like Google News I much prefer quirky idiosyncratic human edited aggregators or being able to tap into the wisdom of the crowds through social aggregators like Hacker News or Reddit.
+ Kottke is described as a “weblog about the liberal arts 2.0.” Edited by the eponymous Jason Kottke it’s been updated almost daily since 1998. You have to admire his persistence and his taste, he frequently digs up amazing things like the seven questions that keep physicists up at night. [kottke]
+ Even for the non-programmer Hacker News is an incredible resource for business and entrepreneur related information. Started by the smart folks at start-up accelerator Y Combinator they use a simple voting system to decide the top links. [Hacker News]
+ Build on the open-source Pligg platform bizSugar uses a Digg-like interface to share small and medium sized business news, tips, videos and strategies. [bizSugar]
+ Fark has always had a fairly misanthropic view of the world. Apply it to business and you get something funny and informative. [Fark.com/business]
+ Mario Maria Popova at Brainpickings is another aggregator in the kottke vein, a single person sharing with the world what she thinks you should check out. I love her description of herself as an interestingness curator & digital anthropologist. I prefer to digest her stuff via her Twitter account like this gem on The Everyday Life of Darth Vader. [Brainpickings]
+ You want to know why I love Twitter? Because I find amazing content and ideas everyday. Though not technically an aggregator I get so much value out of it that I’d be remiss to not recommend it. Feel free to scrape my my follow list for some amazing Twitter users. [Twitter]
Tags: aggregators, Links, round-up
Thanks so much for the shout-out. (And I did once consider changing my name to “Mario,” but never actually did, ha.) It seems like we share a lot of the same RSS staples – love Kottke, use Hacker News daily in my round-up for Wired UK, and have been a longtime Fark addict.
Just a heads-up that the link you have for Twitter Following actually takes the user to his or her own followees – and I think you meant to have yours.
And on that note, you may dig my miscellaneous interestingness Twitter list – the linkers with the best goodies out there.