

Ask YC: Cliff Notes For Blogs - jasonlbaptiste

Thinking of starting a blog, which has a simple goal: Cliff Notes For Blogs (or a <i>blog for the ADD</i>). Two simple updates a day that condenses all the information you would need on the most important topics into short 2-3 sentence summaries.<p>Found the need to do this after a) I wanted to get back into blogging b) I needed a service that would let me not have to spend hours a day reading blogs.<p>Targeted towards two types of readers:<p>a) Those with information overload and could use a good summary of everything, so time frees up.<p>b) Those who want to be up to date and in the know, but dont have time or the know how to read all the important tech blogs.<p>Thoughts? Anything I can clarify?<p>This is not a company, but literally a blog itself.  Also planning on linking back to one good analysis on each topic and one good long post (ie techcrunch, webware,etc.)
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catone
I subscribe to a magazine called The Week that operates on this premise. It's
a weekly that summarizes top stories (general news, editorials, columns,
business, tech, reviews of art, music, books, films, theater, etc.) by drawing
a few key sentences and quotes from multiple mainstream sources.

They have a daily online version here: <http://www.theweekdaily.com/>

None of the stories are generally more than 4 paragraphs or about 12-15
sentences and usually draw on 3-4 sources with varying takes on an issue.

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jasonlbaptiste
what drove you to subscribe? simplicitiy i assume?

do you think something less than 4 paragraphs, more like 4-5 sentences would
work?

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catone
In the world of Twitter ... even 4-5 characters could work. ;)

I actually subscribed because I had expiring airline miles that I had to use
up on something and it was one of the options. That said, I'm planning to
renew. I've found that I am so overloaded with information on a daily basis
that the shorter summaries are a lot easier to keep up with -- and because the
summaries quote their sources anything that I want to delve into deeper I
already have a short list of good articles to check out.

(Side note: I'm a tech blogger, so I spend my week immersed in tech news and
The Week magazine allows me to catch up on all the other news I may have
missed, which is nice.)

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jasonlbaptiste
haha, please don't encourage a twitter competitor with a 4-5 character limit.
:-o

Yup, the goal is to make the consumption of tech news simpler. Definite links
back to other valuable sources + analysis for those who want to dig in deeper.
Not sure if you saw it earlier in the thread, but this site Brijit is similar
to TheWeek. Sadly, they just closed shop.

Wait... you mean there's "other news" out there besides tech?

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catone
Ah yes, I remember Brijit. Even longer ago, in the late 90s/early 00s there
was a site called BriefMe that did email newsletters based around the same
concept. Similarly, it also closed up shop -- possibly for the same reason (it
was paying people $5 per short summary and I guess couldn't break even on the
other end).

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zacharye
I suppose it depends entirely on the execution but for me, sites like Hacker
News, Techmeme, Digg, Reddit, et al have this space pretty well covered.

The core problem I see arising: If you're doing this manually (and solo) and
you don't want to "have to spend hours a day reading blogs," the odds of
coming up with good content from varying sources is a bit unlikely, no?

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jasonlbaptiste
Hacker news + Digg sum up what you "should" be reading, but you still have to
read a ton to get all of it taken care of. Techmeme, sums up what you should
read and the 20 articles like it. Think of cuili. Big takeaways were:

\- Former google employees \- Bigger index by x amount \- 33 mil in venture
funding. \- Search results arent that accurate for reasons xyz

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davidw
If you're good at summarizing stuff, I'm running a little contest on Squeezed
Books:-)

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jasonlbaptiste
Very interesting site. Reminds me of the book summary clubs id see on flights.

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andr
Reminds me of Brijit, which provided 100-word summaries of articles in major
newspapers and magazines. Unfortunately, it ran out of money, because its
business model involved paying people to write the summaries.

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jasonlbaptiste
ive eventually thought about opening it to user submissions. The incentive is
a link back to their site + name credit.

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andr
better yet, do it via trackback or whatever variant is hip those days

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jasonlbaptiste
trackback to submit?

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andr
yes

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henning
One way to make this more successful is to make sure high school students are
forced to read the blogs you're covering, which is why Cliffs Notes and
SparkNotes are successful.

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jasonlbaptiste
hey, that's a very very good point worth mentioning.

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noodle
interesting idea. i think it would work just fine outside the tech industry,
though.

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greyman
Yes, exactly my thought. In tech industry, I'd say the problem you are aiming
at is solved reasonably well already - Techmeme, HN, Friendfeed, or even
slashdot...I just skimm what is new and that is it.

But I don't want to discourage you - it could work, if you will find your own
angle, have good editing skills and willing to do it regularly.

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jasonlbaptiste
Techmeme,etc. all sum up what you should be reading, not what it is.
Techmeme/HN tells you _where to find the news easily_ , not _what the news is
easily_.

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greyman
Can you give some example, then?

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jasonlbaptiste
You visit the site, there are two updates per day posted. Each update has the
most important headlines of the past 12 hours. Example summary or story:

Scrabulous Gets Shut Down on Facebook

-North America ONLY , not international -Decision made by Scrabulous devs, NOT FACEBOOK -Culmination of Hasbro suit filed last week on DMCA grounds -EA has US rights + real networks with international rights

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d0mine
Is the goal to represent news in the twitter format?

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jasonlbaptiste
no, not at all. closest thing to twitter might be the brevity and simplicity.
it will be longer than 140 chars tho.

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d0mine
It could be a Greasemonkey script which would attach available summaries to
links on HN, reddit. Summaries could be picked up from your blog or from
comments with special tag "Summary:

"

EDIT: I mean m/^Summary:\n\n/m

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jasonlbaptiste
I like it actually. Had thought about that later on in terms of scale.

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kn0thing
<pedantic>It's Cliff _s_ Notes</pedantic>

/ducks

I do fancy the idea, though.

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jasonlbaptiste
haha, really? i didnt know that. My apologies to Cliff.

Thanks :)

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schlichtm
We shall call it "Mazy".

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demandred
or get really, really good at skim reading.

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jasonlbaptiste
Sure that works to some degree, but it still takes a ton more time and
organization.

Think of this as a blog reading hack.

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unalone
Kind of like whatthefuckdoineedtoknow.com?

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jasonlbaptiste
haha, funny read.

