Content Types

I’ve found it very hard to comment and write here for many reasons, but probably mostly because I spend so much time in the blogosphere and know what I like to read. And like any fanboy, I like to pretend to the style and quality of writing that I enjoy in others. That is to say that there are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there thousands of blogs out there (that being just the LJ map), and there was a point where I was reading close to a hundred different blogs daily through an RSS reader. When you get that far into the blogosphere, however, you notice that much of what people write are responses to original material from prominent news sources (if it’s a focused blog – technology, gaming, etc.), or responses to their own life experiences. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to devalue the digital records people keep of their analogue lives, but at a certain point I can’t cope with that much emotional investment in people I don’t actually know.

So as I started pruning the list of sites and blogs that I read, I noticed two categories. The first category comprised aggregator sites, or sites that took news from a wide range of sources and compiled it into one site. Examples of this type of site include Slashdot and Digg. The other type of site that I continued to read were those sites that produced truly original material on different topics (as opposed to original material based on personal experiences). Examples from this category include Scoble, A List Apart, and Evan of Google.

As I don’t even remotely claim to have anything original to say on any topics that interest me (web design, game theory, etc), my blog entries will probably consist of link aggregations on different topics I find useful. I may produce one or two paragraphs to link these pages back to class discussion, but aside from that I continue to fear that most of these blog entries will be entirely futile.