Comments on: Stop the fire hose: Primary sources

By: Curtis Lassam » Blog Archive » Today’s Top 10 - January 14, 2010

Curtis Lassam » Blog Archive » Today’s Top 10 - January 14, 2010 — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:47:18 +0000

[...] by Travis’s response to some of my and Allen’s ideas on the concept of information overload… I’ve decided to compile a top-ten of The [...]

By: Antipode - Article – Feeds worth reading

Antipode - Article – Feeds worth reading — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:25:00 +0000

[...] response to my recent crusade for feed unsubscription, I was asked who I’m still reading. Out of my remaining feeds, here [...]

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:58:36 +0000

Definitely primary source if you’re a founder.

By: Allen

Allen — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:44:01 +0000

About my status as a primary source:

I am indeed guilty of this sometimes. My goal generally is to only post things I learnt myself, or links with insight that I consider original. Flipping through recent posts, I think I’m up to 2/3 “new insight” and 1/3 “link repost”. That said, I consider the links about Dave Shea, iWork.com, and VanJS to be original since I found or helped create them, so that’s a grey area.

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:22:07 +0000

Re: Disqus CSS

Yeah, mostly the user’s fault. It’s fairly friendly to altering to your personal theme via CSS.

By: Allen

Allen — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:16:13 +0000

Dan: Google Reader’s suggestions can be great, although I’ve never seen anything to indicate they go off of what articles you click on, but rather what feeds you’re subscribed to. Any background on that?

I’ve considered using Disqus, but I’ve never seen a disqus embed that didn’t look like ass. It’s presumably semantic CSS, so maybe that’s just the fault of the users, but every time I see it it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Curtis: As the a top 10 ranking site for “brain not explode”, I’m sure my pagerank for this term will bring you thousands more brain-oriented hits.

By: Curtis Lassam

Curtis Lassam — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:32:40 +0000

Ahh, fuck you, Dan.

By: Curtis Lassam

Curtis Lassam — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:32:16 +0000

I’ve just received a slight pagerank boost for my site, in regards to the search term “brain not explode”. Awesome.

Still, though, it’s good advice.

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:15:52 +0000

Total aside,

Have you thought about using Disqus for comments? I find it useful for tracking my comments on blogs that use it, without having to remember them all manually.

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:13:31 +0000

If you place all your aggregators in Google Reader as RSS feeds you can get some interesting performance gains.

For instance, having the Programming, Computing Science, Lisp and Haskell Reddits as RSS feeds allows me to bypass the idiotic masses upvoting uninteresting articles and filter them myself as they come in.

And after a short while of reading only articles I like Google Reader starts suggesting some very interesting “Primary Sources”. I now have a dozen or so decent blogs along side of the flood from Reddit.

Which leads to two different reading styles – for the Reddit feeds I scan very quickly. I often don’t even bother to read the entire titles. But for the other feeds I’ll often read at least the first paragraph.

That said, I still have a backlog of around 500 articles to get through in the primary sources, mainly because these last few weeks have been utterly insane with business. Moving, major releases, big bugs, family events, et al.

Also, Allen, you don’t really qualify as a Primary Source given your definition. You tend to comment on concepts you’ve gleaned from multiple Primary Sources. Are you trying to tell us to Fuck Off? ;)