Monday, February 18, 2008
Choosing RSS feeds is a lifelong pursuit. I'm always on the hunt. I'm also always jettisoning stuff. I can't help it--the second I add new feeds to my roster, they seem to change, or stop producing content or (worse still) increase their output drastically.Having a little of something unique is great, but if the content is really monolithic there's no way I'll end up sticking with it. It is the rare feed that will stay in my reader more than a few weeks before being vetoed. And as I find better feeds, I get more and more picky. Here are my ground rules: Content should be substantive but not lengthy; novel but not jokey; sometimes visual but always accompanied by text; if it is political it can't be preachy. Picking a good mix of feeds is an esthetic gesture and I retain full authorship over my own special blend. A lot of it has to do with texture. I'm a big fan of both pictures and text, although sometimes (certainly the case with almost all flickr feeds) I have to settle for just pictures. The perfect feed produces 1-3 stories every 3 or so days.
Another thing I've discovered in my travels is that not all blogs make good feeds. There's a great new blog here in Providence called Daily Dose. I read it mainly for event listings and was initially irritated by the non-stop barrage of political (read: Obama-related) posts (preaching to the choir, anyway). Anyway, it's really grown on me (check it several times a day). That being said I would hate to have to pore through all of those posts every time I opened up Google Reader. Go figure. (It's a complicated world, you know, what with all this technology.)
Last night, I read a lot last night about I. F. Stone, a man about whom I knew nothing. Check it out. Seems he premised his entire career on the idea that governments lie (and?). He's most famous for exposing a lot of undocumented stuff about the Korean war. I'll probably try and pick up some of his books on half.com.
Links:
Okay, I think that's about it.
David
Labels: art
