
On The Web, More Isn’t Only Less, It’s Actually Nothing - mgcreed
http://www.basement.org/2009/09/on_the_web_more_isnt_only_less.html#more
======
mquander
The filter is aggregators like HN or Metafilter or Reddit, which all have
their own flavor and quality. They work fine; you just have to go find ones
you prefer, which is unavoidable, since everyone has their own unique
definition of _"what's really important"_ or _"what you shouldn't miss."_

I don't really understand why the guy in the article has BoingBoing and
Gizmodo in his feeds if he doesn't like the quality and quantity of the
articles they produce. Why would you read a site where only (in his words)
_"ten or fifteen"_ out of 400 posts are ones you really care about?

~~~
DTrejo
Sometimes it is hard to shut out the noise because of the occasional signal.

------
jsm386
"The collateral damage isn’t so obvious but it’s undoubtedly there. Amidst my
400 unread Boing Boing links are probably ten or fifteen that are probably
real gems. But I’ll never know and Boing Boing sure as hell isn’t going to
help me out."

I have to disagree. Lots of blogs, such as Boing Boing do help you find the
'real gems.' (see Don't Miss) The author mentioned Gizmodo. They do the same
with their header.

"If Samsung comes out with a higher capacity battery for one of their mobile
phones, Gizmodo is going to write about it."

True, and as brandnewlow mentioned, this is for SEO purposes. I scan the RSS
feed and click through to the articles that look interesting, while passing
over the latest battery news.

Finally..not sure what the overall argument is here? Most newspapers have more
stories in them (especially on a Sunday) than the majority of people will ever
read. Just because it arrives once a day doesn't really change things. The
author would like blogs to list all of the previous days posts the following
morning? Can't you already do that by browsing archives by date?

------
heyitsnick
I can understand the sentiment but not the body of the argument. We may be
bombarded with information, and that's why many of us turn to aggregation
sites like techmeme itself to pull out a subset of the news we want, for the
quantity that we what. That's why many of us no longer subscribe directly to
gizmodo or techcrunch, but to HN or techmeme.

The author may be able to pull out a date in may where techmeme had
questionable 'news', but how is this different to the slow news days in print
media mentioned in the introduction? Techmeme's job is to provide a page or
two's worth of tech-related news a day, just like a newspaper provides 60
pages of world news daily. TM applies it's own 'judgement and discretion'
(both with it's algorithm and with human editors); HN does the same.

Such aggregation sites are the solution to the problem, not the problem
itself. I personally find that hackernews is a 'twice daily' type product,
where a single check in the morning and the evening keeps me up to date with
the right dosage for my technews. For world news, I read the Guardian's G24
PDF for a daily summary (<http://www.guardian.co.uk/g24>). These are solutions
the internet provides for the issue of constantly streaming news.

Now if you find that the 'refresh rate' of HN or techmeme etc is too frequent,
i'm sure there are sites out there that aggregate in a bi-weekly, weekly or
even monthly rate. If there aren't there's certainly a market for it (for the
same reason there are weekly and monthly magazine publications). But it's not
beyond the capabilities of 'the internet' to find a solution that fits you.

------
alain94040
I for one wouldn't mind seeing a "TechCrunch Weekly", which would present me
with the top-10 or 20 news items of the week that I shouldn't miss to stay
current.

There is a market for the tech-news junkie (read 20 articles a day). And there
is a large market for people who want to stay informed, but don't have the
time to read blogs hourly, but also don't want to miss on what's really
important.

Anyone care to write a filter? How would you know what is important and what
is not? (I guess HN is supposed to be the answer).

------
brandnewlow
You have to post 50-100 times a day because Google rewards the creation of new
URLs above the creation of great URLs.

~~~
jcapote
Care to cite references for that? That's a very interesting fact if it's
true...

~~~
jsm386
I can't provide specifics for the above claim, but SEOmoz's Search Engine
Ranking Factor's survey found _Recency (freshness) of Page Creation_ the 2nd
most important factor outside of keywords.
[http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-
factors#ranking...](http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-
factors#ranking-factors)

Also...SEOmoz just published an interesting experiment exploring the role of
freshness. They attempted to game google (not recommended) by rewriting old
links with new dates, etc. @ [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/does-google-like-it-
when-youre-fr...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/does-google-like-it-when-youre-
fresh)

------
hkuo
The advantages of the new media far outweighs the negatives, and this guy
seems to be another case of focusing on the negatives rather than the
positives. Is there a solution to his problem? Of course! We all know that. It
seems he just has not reached the next level of thinking or searching to adapt
to this new environment and make it work for him. I group him into the type of
people who feel handicapped by their old habits. Nothing wrong with that. He
will figure it out eventually.

------
orblivion
If only there were some sort of website where people voted on interesting
articles they find to promote them to a front page.

Oh, or some sort of RSS reader that allowed you to conveniently share
interesting articles with your friends.

------
arohner
I'm confused. When he starts out, he seems to be saying the problem is that
the news is printed, regardless of whether it's news or not. Yet at the end,
his solution to 'web overload' is the daily news.

