Rui CarmoFollowing up on yesterday’s post, I just went through my newspipe OPML file and pared it down to around 30 feeds.
Since there is hardly any point in listing the ones I kept (most of them are on this site’s sidebar), I’ll give you a run-down of the top 10 9 I threw away, and why:
| Site | Reason |
|---|---|
| 43 Folders | The GTD hype has become too big to be contained in a single blog, and I’ve come to realize that there is a very simple, straightforward solution to doing stuff: do less, but do it better. Plus there has been little original content there of late (note to Merlin: becoming a public speaker has diluted your posts to a point where it’s just not enjoyable to read them anymore). Update: Merlin wrote back, and it turns out he has something in the works that warrants a re-subscription. And no, I’m not telling. |
| Cult of Mac | I’m not too happy with their recent penchant for insta-blogging, adding oodles of irrelevant images and catering to rumors, plus I haven’t seen a decent piece (i.e., something actually written by Leander Kahney) in, oh, quite a while. So it’s not the Cult of Mac anymore – it’s just the cult of rumors, and I don’t want rumors to be part of my Mac experience. |
| Gizmodo | It was a close call between dumping this or Engadget, but the childish, or rather, moronic style of writing eventually made it plain that Gizmodo was a waste of my time. And by the time I saw this, my mind was made up – it’s turning into an online tabloid, and therefore not reliable as a news source. |
| Kottke | It’s not that I don’t like what he writes, it’s simply that he lives in a completely alien reality that I cannot relate to. That and most of his posts were being marked by my Bayesian classifier as irrelevant. Given that it currently shows me only around 10% of my overall feed inflow and that I like what it gives me, I suppose my code knows better. |
| The Macalope | It’s not that going corporate made it less funny, it’s simply that my daily intake of Mac zealotry and vitamins is best fulfilled by other sites. Plus, sometimes, it isn’t funny at all, or doesn’t seem to have quite the same amount of insight as it did. Oh, and did I mention I’m starting to like Microsoft since I stopped reading it? |
| OS News | I ditched the full feed a while back and only kept track of a couple of categories, but the occasional forays into la la land and nostalgia for the AmigaOS and BeOS don’t qualify as news to me, so I dumped it completely this time around. In case you have a passing interest in such things but don’t want to clutter your news intake, it’s much better to subscribe to (for example) the Haiku and Etoilé feeds directly. They have far less updates and better content. And less, as always, is more. |
| Telco 2.0 | It has turned from a source of insightful content (back when it was IMS Insider to a vehicle for advertising their speaking arrangements and consulting services, rendering it pretty much useless. I’m also keeping an eye on whether or not I should dump Telepocalypse, but the dubious signal to noise ratio there is at least compensated by the wry sense of humor. |
| TUAW | Yeah, I know I unsubscribed from it before – I re-added them just prior to the iPhone launch and my vacation, and regretted it almost instantly. Their penchant for cluttering their RSS feed with junk “best of the week” posts and choice of “news” has been steadily eroding my patience. Plus they seldom link to sources – which strikes me as odd, since I have on several occasions spotted funny correlations between their post times and stuff on other sites I follow. |
| VoIP and ENUM | Either there isn’t much happening in the “ENUM”:Wikipedia:ENUM scene, or they kind of lost the plot around May 1st. Then again, I might just have better info. |
| Wired News | WIRED has, in my opinion, failed utterly in one crucial aspect: It does not get the world outside the US, which is the equivalent of seppuku for any magazine or media outlet that tries to cover technology and its impact on society – i.e., we’re global, guys, get with the program. I’ll keep buying the print magazine to gain insights into the US madness, but their approach to web content is, in a word, tired. |