Off the List
I read. A lot. No, not novels or fiction (and not the dictionary, either). I read a lot of news and blogs. That’s where the everyday content lives; the new and upcoming. It’s a source of ideas and knowledge and insight that can’t be obtained anywhere else. I subscribe to an overwhelming number of sites and (mostly) keep up with them every day. But sometimes, the quality of these sites declines over time.
One such example, which was difficult for me to part with, is CNET News. I started reading CNET News for tech news several years ago, and some of the content is still great (particularly those reviews on home theater systems with video included!), but I’ve grown tired of the excessive amount of useless content that I’m forced to sift through each day.
I feel like CNET has gone overboard with publishing too much content, instead of just the good stuff. I feel like a kid whose Oreos have lost their filling. It gets worse, though. There’s just too much editorial mud-slinging and speculative, biased opining. Why must every news event be a conspiracy? Why are there 8,000 “news” posts on Google Buzz making a few minor adjustments, as if they’re a big deal? (For the record, I know business owners who’ve begun using Google Buzz over other products because they are integrated into GMail and other Google Services, making their content distribution streamlined and simple; and this is what Twitter and similar networking services have missed: they’re too isolated. Google wins, again.)
All right. The rambling is over for now, folks. But if you’re out there and you’re a content provider — blogger, news site, whatever — please, please don’t just throw content at your readers, because you’ll lose them. And if you fill a niche for conspiracy theories and government cover-ups, that’s fine, but if your purpose is to report the news as it happened, then please, do just that, and skip all the garbage. It’s frustrating.