Aehso’s Output

Blog entries with links sans context

As the number of RSS feeds I’ve subscribed to has increased over time, I’m already in the routine of periodically pruning some of my lesser read feeds - I put them into a Firefox old feeds bookmarks folder in case I ever need them again. I’m sure everyone does this - subscribe to feeds while working on a particular problem or just monitoring a ’space’ for a while. In time their content is no longer relavent. All nice, good and the way things should be.

I’ve recently noticed a converse reason to unsubscribe from feeds. A couple of normally high quality feeds are more frequently posting single line items that just link to another site with an additional cryptic comment. I’m sure the author is trying to be very clever (or very lazy) but, well, it’s just not clever. A little context goes a long way and means I don’t waste time following links to pages I will invariably have no interest in.

Here’s an example from Dave Winer’s blog. See, how am I supposed to know what he’s pointing to? On the one hand, I do occasionally read Geek News Central so I’m curious go to see what he’s found. Then I find out it’s a comment on an OPML directory that I have no interest in. Would it have killed Dave to put “Geek News Central on Libsyn OPML directory” into the link text?

So, in the interests of preserving my sanity, I’m just removing any feed that does this. The internet is a big place and I’m sure I’ll survive on feeds that have items with real content, or at least tell me what they are point to.

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