Big Bad Bundle Blog
Thanks to a quick tip from Atrios, I headed over to The Connection’s show on blogs, where I got to be the second caller (after what had to be Dan Lyke of Flutterby). I tried to defend the blog’s honor by pointing to the large number of expert bloggers who do serious reporting, at least when compared to the standards of regular journalism. But they responded with a good point: how do you find the good stuff?
Maybe there should be a metablog, collecting all the intelligent expert commentary from the various blogs, separating the wheat from the chaff for a daily bundle of expert reporting.
One might be able to make a whole decent newspaper out of the result, winnowing out all the personal notes and random commentary to get just the juicy insider/expert stuff. It wouldn’t just be news, it’d be an education. You’d learn law, education, economics, governmen, and policy dose-by-dose.
Is there already a blog out there like this? If not, do you have recommendations on blogs to scour for inclusion? Any heavy blog readers willing to help out?
Comment or email.
posted May 11, 2004 11:11 AM (Press Clipping) (12 comments) #
Blog recommendations:
Good stories today from all over:
posted by Aaron Swartz at May 11, 2004 11:19 AM #
http://google.com/news/ + http://blogger.com/
Will they?
posted by Ben Lings at May 11, 2004 12:02 PM #
Check out my comments and associated interiew in:
Interviewed for “Blogging of a Thesis About Blogging”
Regarding:
“Maybe there should be a metablog, collecting all the intelligent expert commentary from the various blogs, separating the wheat from the chaff for a daily bundle of expert reporting.”
This is called “Being an editor, going through the slush pile, and rewriting the marginal articles (or suggesting rewrites to the author).
That is “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
posted by Seth Finkelstein at May 11, 2004 12:20 PM #
MetaFilter (http://www.metafilter.com/) sometimes collects interesting expert opinions… And sometimes stuff that’s utterly irrelevant…
Theoretically you could set up a sort of K5 for blogs, in that people get points for submitting interesting/quality blog entry links. And interesting/quality would be decided by other visitors.
posted by Dominik Rabiej at May 11, 2004 02:18 PM #
PageRank for blogs should do.
posted by pb at May 11, 2004 03:29 PM #
Juan Cole has one of the best expert blogs around. Jack Balkin’s blog is great on constitutional law. Lessig for copyright issues. More Soft Money, Hard Law is an amazingly in-depth blog on campaign finance. MaxSpeak and Angry Bear are both professional economists. Nathan Newman for labor issues. See other recommendations in the list of 2003 Koufax Award finalists for “Best Expert Blog”).
Seth, I think, is correct. PageRank/Technorati-type popularity measures don’t measure what’s good. Arts and Letters Daily sounds sort of like what you want for a “best of the web today” sort of site.
As for myself? I read Daily Kos and Atrios constantly, most of the above via RSS, and several other political ad-related news sources for my own blog (I’m not an expert!).
posted by Luke Francl at May 11, 2004 07:40 PM #
Kinja kind of offers what you’re talking about via the “Editor’s Digests.”
posted by Aaron Logan at May 11, 2004 11:54 PM #
Just one note here: To allow this vision to reach its full potential, blogs should be covered by Creative Commons licenses — so that someone could actually print them out and sell them in newspaper form, for example.
Of course, your weblog already is in the public domain [so is this comment]. Good for you.
posted by Benja Fallenstein at May 12, 2004 04:09 PM #
Just Google for the subject that interests you. Google seems to be getting better at indexing blog entries. I would assume that having the permalink be it’s own page would also help.
There are also a lot of good blogs that simply link to other blog entries. Find those that interest you and subscribe.
posted by Cortland Haws at May 17, 2004 02:11 PM #
Many months ago I posted in my blog on this very subject (Blog Directories: Why Isn’t There a Google of the Blogging World?). While I didn’t have any great technical ideas on how to do this, I said that I thought we needed either a Google blog directory (a la Google’s web and directory sections) or something independent of Google but functioning in a similar way. While this wouldn’t winnow out the blog wheat fr. the chaff, it would allow for a centralized system of searching for, & identifying blog resources. Much needed.
posted by Richard Silverstein at May 28, 2004 05:29 PM #
Blog should have the good editors and be going in one large retrieval system.
posted by andry at July 17, 2004 01:48 PM #
Subscribe to comments on this post.
If you don't want to post a comment, you can always send me your thoughts by email.
Aaron Swartz (me@aaronsw.com)