At the Crafting {:} a Life unconference one of the things that came up in our conversations was how you take information in, while avoiding the endlessly scrolling timelines of FB and Twitter as well as FOMO. My description of how I read feeds ‘by social distance‘ was met with curiosity and ‘can you show us?’. I realised I have blogged about this, but always as part of a much wider discussion of reading and writing on the web, and never as something on its own and in detail. So let’s do that now.
My notions about information strategies and filtering
Let’s start with the underlying assumptions and principles I landed upon using over time:
- There is no way you can take in all available information, there’s simply too much, it’s always been that way. Internet amped up the volume of course.
- Because there’s always been too much information, although internet changed its volume and quality, there’s no such thing as information overload. There do exist failing information strategies, and failing filtering strategies.
- It’s not useful to fear you might miss something in the ocean of information. If it is important it will come back tomorrow, through some other path.
- Filtering, as mental activity I mean, not as rule based technological fix, needs attention, as it is the primary way to shape your information diet
- Filtering also needs attention as it is a key part of what information you share and propagate yourself. Output is the result of processed input. Filtering, again as mental activity as verb, determines input, and thus impacts output.
- My filtering is not a stand alone thing in isolation, it is part of a network of filters, yours, mine, and other people’s. My output is based on filtered input, and that output ends up in other people’s filtered input.I treat blogging as thinking out loud and extending/building on other’s blogposts as conversation. Conversations that are distributed over multiple websites and over time, distributed conversations.
- If you are part of my input, and I am part of your input, then feedback loops get created. It is these feedback loops that lift signals above the sea of general background noise. This is the key bit that means you don’t need to fear missing something, as it will resurface through a feedback loop if it’s important.
- This means that where I source information can’t be of the ‘news’ type, stuff that pretends it is neutral. Neutral isn’t useful in a filter. Commented, interpreted, augmented material is useful in a filter, as it adds context that help determine its information value. I source information from individuals as a result.
- Who you are as a person is an essential piece of context in how to judge information. If you’re walking on the street and a random stranger asks to have a coffee, you interpret it very differently from when your partner walking next to you asks you the same thing. We are all walking information filters, our brains are very well used to doing that. So what I know socially about you helps me interpret what you share, as it will be coloured by who you are. Let’s call this social filtering.
- I know many people, some very well, others less so, or I only know what you’ve shared on your site recently and we haven’t met at all. The social distance I perceive between me and you is part of the context of filtering. This is an otherwise unspecified mix of personal, professional, and other aspects that I am aware of with others.
- When social distance and social filtering are key elements in filtering information, preventing echo chambers is a key concern. This translates into purposefully seeking out divergence and diversity in your network. All your favourite enemies need to be in your information filter as well. And you need to extend your network periodically, while monitoring its health in terms of variety. You then end-up half way between ‘subjective’ (me and my echo chamber), and ‘objective’ (journalism as per its ideal), at ‘multi-subjective’. That’s great because all of human complexity is at that intermediate level between ‘n=1’ / me, and statistics (probabilities across populations): networks of interdependent actors.
Over the years I’ve written a number of postings about the points above. I try to maintain an overview on my page about information strategies.
How I organise my feed reader
All the above serves as a long introduction to why I organise my feed reading the way I do:
- I follow people, not sources. This means that I’m not subscribed to ‘The Local News’, but to blogs kept by individuals. It also means that if you’re Jenny Jensen who writes the blog Pangean Pontifications, I will have you as Jenny Jensen in my feed reader, not your masthead
- I order the feeds I follow in folders roughly by social distance. From people closer to me, to total strangers through multiple levels in between. This isn’t an exactly determined ‘weight’. It is an intuitive arrangement of where I think our current connection/interaction is at. I move things around. E.g. a recent extended blog-based conversation may move you from total stranger to something closer. Meeting and having conversations at an event very likely will as well.
Above is a screenshot of the folder structure in my reader that implies social distance. A12 is the closest level. A I originally meant as my personal ‘A-listers’, and 12 as a number that roughly indicates a circle the size of immediate family and closest friends. The other folders have a similar meaning. B50, a slightly wider group of close professional and personal peers, C150 the connections with let’s say my Dunbar ‘horizon’ or close connections of my close connections, D500 people from various ‘Dunbar number‘ sized circles, communities, contexts I’m part of. E999 new connections, strangers. Most feeds will start in E999, as everything starts out as being miscellaneous. Over time (remember, feedback loops), some will stand out more for me and move to a deeper folder / layer of the onion. People I’ve met will mostly be in folders A12-D500. But I also have one person in my A12 folder I never met in person. Bryan Alexander and I have been in touch a very long time through our blogs, consistently and intensively, and that’s why he’s in the A12 folder. Invitations we made to people for our birthday unconferences will all come from at most the D500 ‘distance’. There is one other folder ‘Keeptrack’ which contains feeds of my own, my company’s or project related and group stuff. The comment feed for my blog for instance.
Within each folder are a number of feeds, which as I wrote are named after their author.
Who is where isn’t an assessment of the person, but of their relative position in my mental network map of every one I know (about). Within a folder there’s no deliberate structure.
You can see the current list of blogs I follow in the right hand sidebar, where you can download it as an OPML file. Most rss readers will allow you to import that and select the feeds you want to subscribe to. I regularly browse such lists when others publish them, to find new people for in my e999 folder.
I counted the feeds I currently have, and this is the distribution:
| folder | # of feeds |
|---|---|
| A12 | 10 |
| B50 | 14 |
| C150 | 14 |
| D500 | 16 |
| E999 | 129 |
This is not a huge amount of feeds, just under 200. There used to be many many more, but when I started blogging more intensively again at the end of 2017, I realised most of my old feeds had gone silent, and I started out with an empty reader. What stands out to me most from that table is that it’s about 50 people I know somehow (A through D), and 129 ‘strangers’ from the e999. That is a visible effect from starting out with ‘everything is miscellaneous‘ and populating e999, after which people will move into one of the other folders over time as patterns and depth of connection emerge. In my old set of subscriptions the ‘closer’ folders were more populated, along the lines of the numbers in the folder names. I expect to over time stabilise that way again (meaning some 500 feeds followed in the A through D folders). Adding, removing or moving feeds I treat as a form of gardening.
The numbers would likely become very different if I can more easily add feeds from other spaces where people I know actually do write and post (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram etc mostly). Hence my interest in IndieWeb protocols such as Microsub and tools like Granary as they can be used to pull stuff out of silos, and hence my interest in what Aaron Parecki calls the social reader, that allows direct interaction with material within my reader, responding and posting directly from it.
Daily reading routines
I currently use Readkit as feedreader, which allows folders, and allows me to rename feeds (so I can turn Pangean Pontification into Jenny Jensen). It also is an ‘offline first’ tool, which is my preferred mode of reading. I let it sync at the start of the day, and then at some point will go through it without needing an internet connection. It’s not in any way getting close to what would be my ideal feedreader (a posting that touches upon many of the points in this posting).
If I have only a little time to take in what others share, I will look only at the A12 folder, or if nothing got posted there at the B50 folder. More time means I will read more widely, moving to the C-D-E folders. That way I get a notion of what bloggers closest to me are writing about every day, and if I have time I will dive into the firehose of everything else. That’s an outside in approach: getting a feeling for what others are writing.
There’s also an inside-out approach where I use the search function to see if anyone has written about e.g. their impressions of Crafting {:} a Life which we visited in the past days, or the current political unrest in Moldova. Ideally I would also be able to tag feeds with aspects I know about its author (e.g. Berlin, coder, art, cycling, Drupal). Then I could ask ‘what are the German people I have in here that are into Drupal talking about this week?’
When I’m done reading for the day I hit ‘mark all as read’, or at least once every few days as I might forget to do it sometimes. ‘Mark all read’ is an important bit of functionality. I don’t really need to read everything, because if I overlooked something, and it’s important, I will come across it tomorrow or whenever the feedback loops bring it back again. Having your reader guilt-tripping you because you have ‘1276 unread items’ is not proper information-hygiene 😀
And you?
So how do you read? Do you publish a list of feeds you follow? I’d be interested to see your list. What would make your reading better, easier, a better routine? What seems useful to you from the above, and might be useful to me from your current set-up?
‘Constructing a body of hypertext over time—such as with blogs or wikis—with an emphasis on the strengths of linking (within and without the text) and rich formatting.’
Bookmarked: https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/06/feed-reading-by-social-distance/
Cripes! I think this is the best essay I’ve read on how to read the Web. I agree with all of it.
At last week’s Crafting {:} a Life unconference on PEI I participated in three conversations on blogging:
What happened to blogging? Initiated by Steven Garrity
The future of blogging. Initiated by Peter Rukavina
Doing Blogging. Initiated by me
Elmine already blogged some of her impressions from these conversations. I’ll add some of my own.
What happened to blogging?
It started with Steven Garrity who asked “What happened to blogging?” in the morning of the first day. Some 20 people wanted to take part in that so we put together a big circle in the main hall. The group had long time bloggers (over 20 years), those whose blogs fell more or less silent, and those who never blogged but are interested in doing so. What followed was a discussion of why we started blogging, and what happened to those initial conditions. I started to think out loud, but kept going because of the wide peer network that emerged because of our distributed conversations across blogs. We suspected started blogging right in the perfect moment: the number of people blogging in your fields of interest was big enough to feel engaged, and small enough to feel like a town you can keep an overview of. We first welcomed the silos like Facebook and Twitter as it made interacting even easier and brought in more people as the required level of tech savvy dropped. What however at first seemed like a source of agency turned into the erosion of it. Long form writing evaporated, more exchanges turned into ’empty calories’. RSS as an easy way of following what was going on eroded the too. Many sites ‘forgot’ what RSS was, and that accelerated when the most visible reader by Google fell by the wayside. Although we also felt that blaming Google Reader solely isn’t right, it was a development that fit in a larger change already underway.
We also discussed how some of that original blog interaction in the early ’00s has been channeled into other modes of communications, like newsletters. Peter Bihr for instance mentioned how it felt like newsletters are a more direct form of communication, with a clear audience in mind, and responses to it are of much higher quality. We missed the kick of the interaction between blogs, as well as having the time and attention to reflect and write more deeply.
Part of the blogging circle
The future of blogging
Having looked back in the morning, some of us felt we wanted to not just be melancholic but also look at what a constructive future of blogging looks like. So Peter suggested to do another conversation in the afternoon. Part of the reason for this was in our immediate circle we saw several people who ‘returned’ to blogging, like myself. Part of it is the appearance of new web standards, the IndieWeb that intends to take the useful traits of social media platforms and apply them to your own websites. Opting to enjoy the weather we had this conversation in Peter’s back yard. We talked about a variety of things connected to blogging. The technology that can assist in getting more interaction between blogs, in helping to make publishing easy. And the behaviours that help to blog more, doing away with expectations of what ‘proper’ blogging is and giving oneself permission to just do what you want.
The future of blogging taking shape in Peter’s back yard
Doing blogging
The second day of the unconference was positioned as a ‘doing’ day. As the ‘future of blogging’ conversation surfaced a lot of ‘how-to’ questions, I suggested we could do a more practice oriented session. On what is currently technically possible, and how that looks in practice for instance in my blog. The weather was great again, so we opted for the back yard like the day before. Bright sunlight and a scarcity of laptops meant we didn’t ‘do’ much. We did talk about the practical steps one can take, and the purpose and working of the various IndieWeb standards. This developed in a wider ranging conversation on our various information routines and the tools we use. Participants were eagerly taking notes to learn from each other’s tool use. From tools and routines we went to life hacks, and a much wider scope of topics. That was a great experience, although it meant that the original topic of conversation moved out of sight. I felt in flow in this conversation, and it went on literally for hours without effort and without energy levels dropping away.
The ‘doing blogging’ circle of participants
Direct consequence is that one of the participants launched her own blog, with IndieWeb support from the start. Another that questions about how I read along lines of ‘social distance’ led to me explaining that in detail today. Important to me is that I also could add a number of bloggers to my ‘global village’ of people whose postings I read, adding more voices to the mix I take in. I also plan to write a number of postings starting from the issues raised in the conversations to introduce and explain the IndieWeb standards. The current documentation mostly starts with tech, and that means a too high threshold for adoption for large groups.
Read Feed Reading By Social Distance by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)
Ton’s archives have some more material on this topic, but it’s definitely an interesting way to sort and filter one’s feeds.
Syndicated copies to:
Read Feed Reading By Social Distance by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)
Another excellent post, I am going to join the conversation…
One does not simply read the Internet…
“Feed Reading By Social Distance” – this is a really interesting approach from @ton_zylstra on how to organize your reading if you follow a lot of blogs in a feedreader: zylstra.org/blog/2019/06/f…
While it grates on me to seeing ‘blogging’ derided, I think it’s a good step if
it moved away from being homework. One of the ‘generalizations’ in the slides
is: “Most students don’t read blogs unless required/forced to.” I think you
would agree that reading is actually the foremost activity when blogging—you
and I do a ton of reading, all of my favorite hypertexters do. And possibly the
biggest problem with social media today is how much writing is done without
sufficient reading. (The term ‘the shallows’ returns to mind—which isn’t a
good adjective for any of the blogs I really get into.)
To me, it is the method of reading that needs to be questioned—not the method
of writing. Express yourself however you want. But now we’ve got mixed media
everywhere and it’s been very hard for people to adapt to consuming a variety of it. (Certain
people have adapted to listening to podcasts, others to YouTube, very few to
blogs—possibly as a result of the complexity of hypertext.)
However, Ton’s recent stuff on reading by social
distance
seems to show how early we are in fathoming how to read the world of
dynamic, criss-crossing text.
It seems similar to clip art of previous generations—it prevents the paralysis
of a blank canvas for many people. It also seems to be part of the movement to
make text more visual—as seen in Twitter embeds or using screenshot images of
text—people seem to be getting more averse to just straight text. (This could
get even worse if VR ever takes off.)
But I really agree with your point. Even in this video, many poor reasons are
given for dropping ‘blogging’: it’s not “disruptive” enough, students don’t
intuitively understand it (lacking a historical context for it), it’s not
trending any more… But text still has real power. If anyone doubts me
on this point, go read Nadia Eghbal’s essay “The Tyranny of
Ideas”—I thought this was tremendous. Sure,
she could have done this as a video—but it would have likely taken longer,
required more equipment, and I think it would be more difficult to review again
and again. Does text need a performance?
I think h0p3 is spot on with the term
antipleonasmic. Which could also be
rephrased: “the dogged attempt to resist cliché.”
Restorative justice? What’s that? by Howard Zehr (Zehr Institute)
I’m curious. I have questions that I have been unable to answer via Google search. For example, how does the process address acts where the victim has been permanently harmed? Examples that come to mind:
The victim has suffered financial loss too significant for the person committing the act to provide restoration
The victim has been disabled and is unable to work
There are multiple victims and some of the victims prefer traditional justice
What are your filters, human and algorithmic, not letting you see?
The USA border patrol is using soviet era tactics in foreigners and Americans.
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Last June I looked in a description of my feed reading habits by social distance I mentioned the number of feeds I currently subscribe to. Now two months later, I was curious to see what, if anything, has changed.
Here’s the table with the number of subscriptions on June 12th:
folder
# of feeds
A12
10
B50
14
C150
14
D500
16
E999
129
And these are the numbers for August 8th, two months since:
folder
# of feeds
change
A12
10
–
B50
18
+4
C150
22
+8
D500
19
+3
E999
150
+21
About 3 dozen new subscriptions in two months. In reality it is a bit more than that, as I also removed some existing ones. Subscription maintenance is like gardening. There’s been a slow trickle from the outermost folder to more inwards folders. This was expected, as I’ve met-up with various people at events, and that usually means moving their feed to a ‘closer’ folder. Events, such as Peter’s Crafting {:} a Life unconference in June als led to new subscriptions, some of which as they started in intensive conversations immediately moved to a ‘closer’ folder. And there have been a few cases of ‘I’m going back to blogging and leaving Facebook’. (much like I did late 2017, and Peter did much earlier, before severing the connection to FB completely mid 2016) So those subscriptions are more of the ‘welcome back playing outside’ variety.
Btw, I publish my current list of feeds that I subscribe in the side bar of this blog, titled OPML Blogroll. That link is to a file (tonzylstra.opml) you can read yourself, as well as provide to your feedreader for import. As always I am interested in what other people are reading and who’s blog they follow. So if you don’t, I hope you’ll consider publishing your subscription list or turn it into an old fashioned blogroll.
I was delighted to be tweeted by Ton Zylstra, an old blogging contact from the Triassic era of blogs…
Thanks to Ton’s little prompt I realise I remember Blogwalk IV, and reading back over the posts here and elsewhere I’m struck by how much is still relevant 15 years later – but that’s for another post (as is an update on IndieWeb).A different approach to organising web feedsInevitably following links to revisit Ton’s blog I found Feed reading by Social Distance
Which has obvious resonances with Harold Jarche’s Seek Sense Share and also Luis Suarez’s approach to Twitter filtering I mentioned here and here.Looking back at similar ideas with TwitterLooking back at the earlier Twitter-based idea, I slipped back fairly quickly. Although I still have the original lists I set up, I don’t garden them very often, and I’ve followed a lot more new people than I unfollowed as part of the experiment. Thinking about why that might be:
generally my PKM practice is over-biased to “Seek” vs “Sense” and “Share”
The signal-to-noise of Twitter gets worse (and yes that should push towards using some filtering, but in practice means it becomes less attractive as a PKM tool)
Brexit – not only a VAST source of the increased noise, but sadly I find myself glued to Twitter in a less and less useful way
I found that the lists were rapidly becoming echo chambers
Moving beyond TwitterI still use web feeds as a major source, although mine are in Feedly. Although Feedly is a closed garden these days (they used to make public feeds possible), the affordances of the product work well for me, in particular the mobile client. I do most of my feed catchup on buses or when otherwise waiting, with IFTTT processes set up to route things of interest for later exploration.Feed gardening, like Twitter list gardening, is very much in the category of “things I know I should do more of”. Feedly currently reports that I have 708 sources of which 277 are inactive and 81 unreachable.Like Twitter, I find my use of feedreaders is quite hybrid. There are sources that I follow for specific information that can be applied in my working life (usually corporate) which wouldn’t fit into the social distance categorisation. Then there are the feeds which might be applicable to day-to-day work, or might well be more related to broader ideas that interest me – these may well fit into the social distance model if I wanted to use it, although given the rather wide range of things I find interesting, some kind of topic-based organisation seems likely too.Dealing with Echo ChambersEcho chambers are present everywhere, including online.As an example, the #ListGate meme from summer 2019 exposed the cliqueish thinking amongst a significant number of popular educational tweeters / bloggers, expertly dissected by (amongst others) DaN McKee in this thread.Ton addresses the issue of echo chambers thus:
It’s a sound approach if you are seeking to use social media or web feeds for any kind of knowledge source. I think however that in current times this called for a balanced strategy. In terms of the main timeline, and the vast amounts of gaslighting, bots, trolls and shills then robust blocking and unfollowing is almost essential. I think this supports using lists etc for the more professional aspects of platform use in order to balance.Would I use this approach more?The gist of the idea makes sense to me – social constructivism is a key facet of PKM.The hybrid approach, as I mention for both Twitter and web feeds essential. I use both of these sources for more than one thing, so it make sense that I should apply more than one technique to using them.Practically, will I do the work? I could see it happening slowly, provided I’m pragmatic about what I expect to get from it. And the hybrid approach means there is no success or failure, only more or less personal utility, which makes this much lower stakes…
It’s rather cool to see Neil adopting parts of my information strategies. Looking forward to reading more about how it plays out for him. There were several interested during last weekend’s IndieWebCamp too. Having more perspectives on this approach may help to formulate a more generic description of this process.
Liked a post by Neil Mather
Image credit 1In Filtering Information by Social Distance I referenced an article by Ton Zijlstra describing an approach to categorising RSS feeds in a feedreader.Although slightly sceptical I’ve now re-arranged my feeds in a similar way:New structure of folders in FeedlyIn the process I’ve also carried out a serious prune from 708 feeds (277 inactive, 81 unreachable) to 232 feeds (29 still classed as inactive by Feedly, but kept because they still look reasonably fresh).An immediate advantage of this layout is that it completely eliminates the momentary pause whole working out what folder(s) to put a feed in – the social distance measure is entirely subjective and I didn’t find a single one where I didn’t have an immediate sense of where to place it (especially remembering that everything is miscellaneous, so if in doubt E999!)I now wait to see if the reading (and more importantly, the filtering to surface relevant information) is also improved.Ton also suggests we get back to the spirit of the original blogroll – I want to build something that will pull my OPML from Feedly and incorporate it into the site – in the meantime here is a static export of my feeds as of today – OPML.
Mason Bryant CC-BY-SA 2.0
^
This is really useful Ton. I’ve tried various categorisations and filtering approaches but this one feels right. I particularly agree with the following people rather than their chosen brand or identity. Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do after all!
I also like the idea of sharing your blogroll as an opml file rather than as a visible list.
Thank you Euan. I’ve changed the OPML file somewhat, so that it is also human readable, not just machine readable. That ‘somewhat’ is adding a stylesheet to the opml. As described / linked to my friend Peter’s description here: https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/06/my-human-readable-opml-blogroll/
Harold Jarche rightly points to being able to judge and shape your information filters as a critical element in keeping yourself informed about emergent crises like Covid19. What Harold calls trusted filters is the primary reason I follow people not sources in my feeds, and all of those people are selected by myself, not by someone else’s algorithm. It is how I came across Harold’s post in the first place, because he’s been in my list of feeds for many years. Feedback across filters, so that what Harold shares might get commented here, which then gets shared back to my network which includes Harold, is how patterns emerge. This of course does mean you need to ensure your filter has enough variety and churn to avoid echo chambers. Which is why hand curating my list of people to follow is important, I know these people and what I know about them is an active part of the filtering I do. In my mind, the combination of my filtering and sharing, and Harold’s filtering and sharing as well as those of others I follow, constitute a LOFAR, which is able to spot small movements and emerging interests across my networks, and recognising which noises are actually signals to my interests and concerns. Keeping my LOFAR in good working order requires regular attention, and likely more than I already pay to it.
This doesn’t mean that institutional information isn’t valuable. It is actually invaluable. Institutions are the stock of info, the residue of years of knowledge, where my networks and filters are the flow, the reflection on, application, changing and emergence of knowledge. Such knowledge is critical for crap detection, also when it comes to the stuff my network shares with me. In times of emergent crises like Covid19, such institutional knowledge about how to deal with the specifics of e.g. a pandemic is crucial. So I keep an eye on the general statistics collected at John Hopkins, the advise and info of the RIVM (the Dutch national institute for health and environment, in charge of epidemic response) concerning the Netherlands specifically, and what e.g. the WHO says about pandemic response on a personal level and organisational level (e.g. business continuity). My LOFAR in turn allows me to sense what is going on across my networks in this context.
The LOFAR ‘superterp’ in Drenthe, which has hundreds of small antennas, combining with 47 other locations into a total of some 20.000 antennas for signal detection
Quite a while I wrote about building a social reader[^ Then called IndieWeb reader, but social reader is the better term.], but these days I have to admit it went nowhere. The biggest problem with it being that I myself don’t really use any reader to consume stuff: I was not used to keeping up with blogs, I only used to mindlessly scroll through Instagram. These days I got the Twitter app back on my phone again, so I make my scrolls there too.
What does seem to work over the past two months or so, is that I occasionally look at the NetNewsWire Mac app, which I pinned to my dock. Seeing the icon makes me click on it, and this way I do read or skim blogs I follow. I organised stuff by social distance, or something close to it, like Ton suggested. I notice that it makes me sad some people I want to follow as a person are not available via RSS/Atom.
The experience on NetNewsWire is not quite the way I want it, but I figured it is better to use an imperfect setup than no setup at all. I really enjoy being in the loop with content I actually care about, sorted by how much I care about it (thanks Ton). Maybe from here I can improve things (including but not limited to my own RSS format).
NetNewsWire just released an iOS app, so I have to check that out too.
I need to do some deep thinking and design layout of the feed reader I’d like to have. Something like a cross between some of the traditional readers like Inoreader and Fraidy.cat which has some of the time-based and social sorting that Ton has suggested in the past.
While I wrap up Fraidycat 1.1.3 — which solves the conflict with Firefox’s ‘Strict’ Tracking — here are some kind words from someone who inspired the organizational aspects of Fraidycat, Ton Zijlstra..
Ik lees te veel, momenteel, denk ik, en in te veel talen door elkaar.
Uiteraard volg ik nieuws. Sinds het begin van De Situatie ben ik verslaafd aan het live-blog van de NOS. Ondanks dat ik hier herhaaldelijk heb geschreven dat ik ermee gestopt ben, bleef ik ‘m nog met enige regelmaat refreshen.
Daarnaast heb ik NRC.nl ontdekt, wat aanzienlijk beter geschreven is dan veel andere dingen die ik online lees (mag je ook verwachten). Het enige is dat het nog even wennen is om dergelijke kwaliteit (en lengte vooral) op een scherm voor je te zien in plaats van op papier.
En dan is er nog de RSS-reader die ik afgelopen weekend weer extra vol heb geladen met feeds. Ik heb geloof ik al eerder aangehaald dat ik de tactiek van Ton gebruik en die werkt heel fijn, vind ik, veel fijner dan organisatie rond thema’s en onderwerpen. Ik volg mensen en die deel ik in op afstand, waarbij ik dus ook makkelijker door de ‘e999’-map heen kan scrollen en ik dus meer tijd neem voor de ‘c150’, etc.
Daarnet zat ik dus tussen al die mapjes een Engels stuk te lezen, en daar duizelde het me opeens helemaal. Ik lees Engels net zo makkelijk als Nederlands, maar op dat moment was ik me er opeens ontzettend bewust van dat ik prima Engels kon lezen. Tegelijkertijd vond ik dat ontzettend logisch, en daarna merkte ik dat ik in die modus zat waarbij je wel met je ogen langs de tekst gaat en ook wel concepten mee krijgt, maar dat je eigenlijk gewoon zelf ergens anders aan zit te denken.
Enfin, de enige conclusie die ik eruit kon trekken is dat ik teveel lees en te weinig slaap.
(Over lezen gesproken, daar las ik vanochtend nog iets over. Makers tegenover afnemers, maar ook het idee van de ‘consultant’ die een-op-een werkt. Interessante punten, al is het natuurlijk niet zo zwart-wit. Ik beschouw mijzelf als maker die momenteel veel leest, laten we het daar op houden.)
Bryan Alexander provides an overview and interesting analysis of his current social media presences and what they mean and have meant for him, his work…