The news feed
My relationship with the internet is not particularly far-ranging. I communicate with the debate world via email, a constant business during the season, I manage various tournaments one way or another (lately through the genial medium of tabroom.com), I watch Sim Debaters on Facebook and play the odd game of Scrabulous, and I keep up with forensic events on the handful of likely websites. Additionally I contribute my own take on said forensic events with this blog, which does have a decent readership across the country, and which does indeed make it into the hands (minds) of many people with whom I maintain at least an implicit if not explicit dialogue. In other words, I am part of the general discourse of this very specific business of high school debate, and the internet has made this discourse easy and engendered its conduct over a national canvas. Ten years ago we had no such national discourse (which should not be confused with the national $ircuit, which is a different thing altogether). Today, I know I can walk into any debate tournament in any state in the country and immediately rise to the top of the most-striked-judges list. Our world has become a national community. This is a good thing.
In addition to this maintenance of my debate life online, I have a handful of other concerns. I am a dedicated student of queue maintenance at Netflix. I RSS feeds from various Apple websites to alert myself to problems I need to know about or products I need to buy. I’ve taken to Remember the Milk and Google Calendars and iCal and my iPod (swearing never to abandon Shortie G again). If I’m hanging around my office at lunch time I’ll scan Boing Boing, daily Wired feeds, and various random aggregators like Digg and Engadget and Dvorak’s blog, but I’m no addict of any of them, and see them merely as something to read other than the books I’m normally reading during the day. I track Disney news because I find it fun, but again, this is a good three minutes of my day at best (except when something interesting like the It’s A Small World controversy erupts). I access a couple of comics that aren’t in the local Gannett paper, and I see if Publishers Weekly is up to anything interesting. If I still have time on my hands, it’s a video like Mahalo Daily or Diggnation or something over at Leo Laporte’s universe. Of course, I also regularly listen to a bunch of podcasts while driving back and forth from work and while doing my morning exercise, and most of these are listed over on the right.
I know people who are way more internetted than this. People who read websites regularly—daily—as sources of news and as sources of entertainment. I seldom spend any time at the computer when I’m at home doing anything that isn’t productive. I’m not using my browser. I’m setting up tournaments or writing or recording Nostrums or ripping my cassettes or getting The Imaginationland Trilogy from DVD to mp4 for iPod viewing on the next airplane trip (who better than the South Park cast to watch on that little screen, after all). I use my computer to compute more than anything else. Lots of people I know are online all night trawling the web instead of or while they’re watching TV, keeping up with whatever it is they keep up with. If you’re a news junkie, the web is heroin. And of course, if you’re a gamer, that will pretty much be the end of any other hours in the day. I’ve resisted gaming for the most part because I know I’d never get anything done, and I’ve been happy just to dabble, most lately with my DS. It’s like crossword puzzles: I know that the only real reason I read the paper is to do the puzzle (preferably while showing off in front of others—it’s one of my better parlor tricks).
So I am not a greatly plugged-in character with any particular experiential reason for thinking I need to share stuff. But I do have one relatively useful experiential talent: I’m an editor. I have been an editor for lo these many years now. One of my skills is the ability to select reading material for various audiences. At present I’m picking entertainment for a fairly vast mass market, and doing quite well at it, thank you very much. One of the points I made about newspapers was not that the material was simply helter-skelter but that it was the subject of an editing overseer. The news in the Times is not random. There’s all sorts of editors, be it of the news or of the features or of the books or of the arts or of sports. The discourse of the paper is arbitrated by these editors.
My first experiments in finding a substitute for the newspaper experience has led me to Google Reader as a quite nice aggregator of web sources. And being Google, there’s all sorts of connectivity features to other Googliana. So what I’ve started doing, and keep in mind this is still experimental, is aggregating from all sorts of sources, then porting it over to a public page. And the nice thing about the public page is that you can then RSS that page back into Google Reader (or any feed receiving variation thereof). So if you want, you can look at the long page of fed stories, or you can just get a feed of the feed. Whichever. More to the point, the stories are selected as interesting to the general forensic audience. I’m not saying anyone would read them all (not even me, or at least not completely), but that they all seem to hold some value. Articles on minorities, law, philosophical issues, pomo, art, debate specifically, whatever.
Does it work? I have no idea. I just started. But the fed page can be fed from multiple sources, I gather. This can be interesting. We’ll see.
No comments:
Post a Comment