You know, it occurs to me that I’ve never really said what these “Links” are for, nor how I gather them. I’ll leave the “what they’re for” for a moment, and tell you the “how” of putting these lists together.
Basically, these links represent about a week of me reading an assortment of content from about 150 different RSS feeds to which I’ve subscribed using Google Reader (yes, I know, now Google knows what I read, but it’s the tool for which I’ve optimized this process). While in Reader (using FireFox, with GreaseMonkey installed, running Google Reader Absolutely Customizable), I can quickly navigate through posts, reading either a blurb or the full article, depending upon what the feed author has decided to publish. As I read, I can mark items as “starred,” to come back to later and examine more closely to determine whether they belong on the Links post.
Once I’m satisfied with the list of starred items, I have a .php script which consumes the RSS feed generated by my starred items, putting them into a standard format (basically, the HTML code for what’s below, yet without categories). I take that generated HTML, dump it into Excel where it falls into a series of columns with the title of the piece all by itself (thanks, .php script for making this part so much easier). I then sort by title & go through categorizing each link into what I think is its dominant category, sometimes pulling a link & copying it into two categories. I then sort by category and reverse date order, write a few Excel formulae to put on each section’s header, copy the code out into Notepad++ where I run a series of formatting replacements so that things lay out in a way which is easier to navigate than HTML all run together.
It’s at this point that I’m ready to add some commentary. All told, each Links post probably represents about 20 hours of reading and culling, probably about an hour of massaging content into their categories (which requires some re-reading to figure out why I thought the item was significant) and into an easily-editable format, and another hour or so adding commentary (if I’m not feeling lazy by this point).
Now, back to the “why” of doing this, as it’s certainly not something which is without effort, nor is it a trivial exercise. I do these posts because I believe the issues examined or linked to are significant to our lives, both digital and physical. I examine these issues because they are significant, and tend to be overlooked by most media, or are only touched upon lightly when they are examined at all.
As Bill pointed out to me last week, there is quite a lot of tension between some of these issues – for example, the tension between censorship on the one hand, and cyber-bullying on the other. There is tension between the right to privacy and the public’s right to know, or between freedom of expression and security. These tensions and how they are resolved are, to me, important issues, in particular because we interact so thoroughly through the medium of networked communications.
So, yet another batch of links for you all. Enjoy! And do feel free to check out the archives, particularly if you’re receiving these via email, as all of these are archived at http://hobbitsabroad.com/?cat=36
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