I've been wondering lately if there would be a way to build a higher-trust version of Technorati: taking trackbacks from literally anyone and filtering through the spam is obviously a losing...
I've been wondering lately if there would be a way to build a higher-trust version of Technorati: taking trackbacks from literally anyone and filtering through the spam is obviously a losing battle in the present, but with a higher bar to get in, you could still pull RSS feeds and do a similar "what's trending in the blogosphere?" sort of site. I assume TechMeme works something like that, though I know they have human editors as well.
Non-social media based discovery of posts is what's kneecapping blogging right now.
This is the most annoying hurdle as a reader. I only learn about interesting blogs when they’re linked in a blog I already read. I’ve tried using search engines to find more but the noise is too loud.
Non-social media based discovery of posts is what's kneecapping blogging right now
This is the most annoying hurdle as a reader. I only learn about interesting blogs when they’re linked in a blog I already read. I’ve tried using search engines to find more but the noise is too loud.
ooh.directory and marginalia help for me. Webrings are also useful. There's also https://theforest.link/ if you have nostalgia for StumbleUpon. Much like music, I prefer to actively seek out blogs...
ooh.directory and marginalia help for me. Webrings are also useful. There's also https://theforest.link/ if you have nostalgia for StumbleUpon.
Much like music, I prefer to actively seek out blogs instead of relying on an algorithm of any kind. So far, my discovery is mostly based on the vaguely graph traversal-ish nature of links. But sometimes it's nice to gamble on totally random stuff and see if you like what you find.
sidenote: this post makes me wish we had some kind of place where tildes posters could link to their personal blogs (without it feeling like self promotion). I'd definitely follow a lot of folks here based on conversation quality!
Thanks for sharing the forest link! It’s already provided some interesting reading material. I think the tildes user bio should be the place to share a personal website. Admittedly I don’t check...
Thanks for sharing the forest link! It’s already provided some interesting reading material.
I think the tildes user bio should be the place to share a personal website. Admittedly I don’t check users’ profiles very often, because the bio is hidden by default on mobile. The user profiles on lobsters are much more personal and I’ve had better success finding links there.
When I was still using it, one of the things I really liked about Inoreader was that it showed the relative popularity of any given post from an RSS feed: https://i.horizon.pics/KcM6CR2kZ4.png So...
When I was still using it, one of the things I really liked about Inoreader was that it showed the relative popularity of any given post from an RSS feed:
So in that image above, you can see the "score" of each post in the New York Time's RSS feed, and a little icon that quickly indicates a post's relative popularity. I don't know how they calculate the score of each post, but the gist of it is:
Average-and-below popularity posts get a gray arrow
Above average popularity posts get an orange arrow
Very popular posts (not pictured) get a red arrow
I think it's a neat system for being able to browse fast-moving RSS feeds and quickly pick out major stories. It's like a "hint of social" in your RSS feed. Pinboard's popular bookmarks page is a similar "hint of social" feature that I really like.
I think Marginalia does a pretty good job of explaining itself, but if you want to know more about the Kagi Small Web feed, their blog post announcing it is a pretty good explanation:
They have multiple feeds to choose from in addition to the main one, including an "appreciated" feed that they use to highlight content they like, a feed just for videos, and a feed for programming-related posts. You don't need to subscribe to the search engine to use the RSS feeds. You can find a list of the 14,000+ sites that are part of the feed here:
I’ve used Kagi’s small web before and love the idea but it’s pretty buggy for me on mobile. I’ll have to try marginalia out though, never used it. At this point I should invest time into an RSS...
I’ve used Kagi’s small web before and love the idea but it’s pretty buggy for me on mobile. I’ll have to try marginalia out though, never used it.
At this point I should invest time into an RSS reader, I just search for memorable blog titles until I find the blog I’m looking for.
When I was still using it
Do you use another RSS reader now or have you moved on from them?
Right now I use BazQux. It's fine. I don't have any complaints about it, but I did like Inoreader more. I stopped using Inoreader though, because I think its regular price of $90/year is too...
Right now I use BazQux. It's fine. I don't have any complaints about it, but I did like Inoreader more. I stopped using Inoreader though, because I think its regular price of $90/year is too expensive. For the past few years I had been able to subscribe for $45/year during their annual November sale. However, in November 2023, they only offered that sale to new subscribers, not existing, so I jumped ship to BazQux (that costs $30/year).
(While writing my earlier comment, I signed back into my Inoreader account (that still exists on their free tier) to take the screenshot I posted. I noticed that now I could re-subscribe to Inoreader for $60 for the first year. 🙄)
Anyways, Inoreader has a free tier, and BazQux has a free 30-day trial. There are also tons of other feed readers out there, including many that are totally free. There was a discussion about them on Tildes back in June:
RSS is something I've been meaning to get back into. I used to be really into it, but sometime after Google Reader disappeared there was a mix of my interests shifting, less things having RSS...
RSS is something I've been meaning to get back into. I used to be really into it, but sometime after Google Reader disappeared there was a mix of my interests shifting, less things having RSS feeds, and the cultural shift to social media, so I became a lot more dependent on Reddit. (One year clean from that now.) It just seems daunting to build up a new set of subscriptions, build a habit, and figure out how to balance having enough incoming posts to be useful while avoiding the deluge of unwanted fluff from high volume feeds.
I've been wondering lately if there would be a way to build a higher-trust version of Technorati: taking trackbacks from literally anyone and filtering through the spam is obviously a losing battle in the present, but with a higher bar to get in, you could still pull RSS feeds and do a similar "what's trending in the blogosphere?" sort of site. I assume TechMeme works something like that, though I know they have human editors as well.
Non-social media based discovery of posts is what's kneecapping blogging right now.
This is the most annoying hurdle as a reader. I only learn about interesting blogs when they’re linked in a blog I already read. I’ve tried using search engines to find more but the noise is too loud.
ooh.directory and marginalia help for me. Webrings are also useful. There's also https://theforest.link/ if you have nostalgia for StumbleUpon.
Much like music, I prefer to actively seek out blogs instead of relying on an algorithm of any kind. So far, my discovery is mostly based on the vaguely graph traversal-ish nature of links. But sometimes it's nice to gamble on totally random stuff and see if you like what you find.
sidenote: this post makes me wish we had some kind of place where tildes posters could link to their personal blogs (without it feeling like self promotion). I'd definitely follow a lot of folks here based on conversation quality!
Thanks for sharing the forest link! It’s already provided some interesting reading material.
I think the tildes user bio should be the place to share a personal website. Admittedly I don’t check users’ profiles very often, because the bio is hidden by default on mobile. The user profiles on lobsters are much more personal and I’ve had better success finding links there.
When I was still using it, one of the things I really liked about Inoreader was that it showed the relative popularity of any given post from an RSS feed:
https://i.horizon.pics/KcM6CR2kZ4.png
So in that image above, you can see the "score" of each post in the New York Time's RSS feed, and a little icon that quickly indicates a post's relative popularity. I don't know how they calculate the score of each post, but the gist of it is:
I think it's a neat system for being able to browse fast-moving RSS feeds and quickly pick out major stories. It's like a "hint of social" in your RSS feed. Pinboard's popular bookmarks page is a similar "hint of social" feature that I really like.
You also might be interested in the Marginalia search engine and the Kagi Small Web feed.
I think Marginalia does a pretty good job of explaining itself, but if you want to know more about the Kagi Small Web feed, their blog post announcing it is a pretty good explanation:
https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
They have multiple feeds to choose from in addition to the main one, including an "appreciated" feed that they use to highlight content they like, a feed just for videos, and a feed for programming-related posts. You don't need to subscribe to the search engine to use the RSS feeds. You can find a list of the 14,000+ sites that are part of the feed here:
https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallweb.txt
I’ve used Kagi’s small web before and love the idea but it’s pretty buggy for me on mobile. I’ll have to try marginalia out though, never used it.
At this point I should invest time into an RSS reader, I just search for memorable blog titles until I find the blog I’m looking for.
Do you use another RSS reader now or have you moved on from them?
Right now I use BazQux. It's fine. I don't have any complaints about it, but I did like Inoreader more. I stopped using Inoreader though, because I think its regular price of $90/year is too expensive. For the past few years I had been able to subscribe for $45/year during their annual November sale. However, in November 2023, they only offered that sale to new subscribers, not existing, so I jumped ship to BazQux (that costs $30/year).
(While writing my earlier comment, I signed back into my Inoreader account (that still exists on their free tier) to take the screenshot I posted. I noticed that now I could re-subscribe to Inoreader for $60 for the first year. 🙄)
Anyways, Inoreader has a free tier, and BazQux has a free 30-day trial. There are also tons of other feed readers out there, including many that are totally free. There was a discussion about them on Tildes back in June:
This discussion on Lobsters also has many recommendations:
RSS is something I've been meaning to get back into. I used to be really into it, but sometime after Google Reader disappeared there was a mix of my interests shifting, less things having RSS feeds, and the cultural shift to social media, so I became a lot more dependent on Reddit. (One year clean from that now.) It just seems daunting to build up a new set of subscriptions, build a habit, and figure out how to balance having enough incoming posts to be useful while avoiding the deluge of unwanted fluff from high volume feeds.
Maybe we need a new wave of aggregator sites like Tildes and Reddit. Or a search engine specifically for blogs.