Regarding the Feed

I seem to be moving at half speed, for some reason. Pretty busy at the DJ, I guess, sapping energy from other things that I’m not getting paid for. It happens.

As I do occasionally, I’ve been rethinking my various enterprises. Chief among these are the Coachean Feed, which is probably the most underrated and least utilized thing I do (unless it is the most useless thing I do, and I’m just deluding myself). As the VCA knows, I’m a big fan of using RSS to aggregate internet content. I use Google Reader on my computers; to be honest, I haven’t found the perfect reader on the iPad yet. Feeddler is okay but not great, and no other seems to have hit the sweet spot yet going by the reviews. (Simply using Google Reader in Safari on the pad, unfortunately, is not as satisfactory as it is on a computer because of some interface issues, otherwise I’d just do that.) Anyhow, when I feel like seeing what is going on in the world, I turn to my reader and browse my very organized content feeds. Some of these feeds contain material relevant to debate. My goal with the CF is to act as a curator of this material and to pass it along to interested parties.

For a while I would grab the content, highlight some catchy parts, add a comment and the link, then put it into a separate blog, which I would then feed to myself and mark, which would then send it to the CF. To make sure these things were getting out there, at one point I was even linking this blog to my @jimmenick Twitter account, having them cross-posted there. But this is a lot of hoo-ha for relatively self-explanatory material most of the time. If I simply mark an article as I read it in my own travels, it will also automatically be sent to the CF. That’s what I’ve been doing lately. So if you follow the feed with this link, you’ll still see a pretty regular stream of articles that, it seems to me, anyone of the high school debate persuasion would find at least marginally interesting. Since I will seldom write a separate blog entry on these pieces, I’ve disconnected the link from them to Twitter.

Anyhow, I still maintain that the Coachean Feed is worthwhile for anyone in the activity. You can simply point a bookmark at it and read it every few days, and I guarantee you will find something interesting and/or useful. Or, if you’re like me, you can plug the link into your own RSS to see articles as they’re marked. Whichever. The bottom line is, it’s good stuff. There’s a lot of chaff on the internet: why wouldn’t you occasionally want some straightforward wheat?