RSS is history. We know that. It's been replaced by ... by ....
Right. Whatever is going to replace Feeds (RSS/Atom) hasn't quite arrived. So, while we wait, we read. In my case, I read using Reeder.app on my iPhone, Reeder for Mac on my main machine, and Google Reader elsewhere.
Recently, I did a reorg and cleanup of my subscriptions. I deleted perhaps 30 -- some hadn't been updated since 2006. A few were quite good, but ended abruptly a few years ago. Perhaps the author will return, maybe something happened to them. Google abandoned many blogs when they went G+, I deleted most of them. They're not very interesting any more anyway.
I was left with 363. I've long organized them by source and topic, such as "NYT" or "Science". This works pretty well, but there's a subset of blogs that are special. These blogs may not publish very often, but I read almost every article. They deserved more attention.
I've put these into a folder I call "Core", and I've shared them in a Google Reader Bundle called "Core" [1]. You can subscribe to them through the "bundle" (assuming it still works) and delete the ones you don't want. Or you can google the names on this list (I left out Gordon's Notes and Gordon's Tech because I'm just that kind of guy):
All That's Interesting - pictures mostly
Blood & Treasure - China from a UK view
Charlie Stross - thinker and writer
Coates - intellectual. Aka TNC, Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Coding Horror - geek and thinker
Cosmic Variance - physics
Daring Fireball - often annoying, almost always interesting. Mac
DeLong - an old favorite, though we read too much of the same stuff.
Ezra Klein - politics
Fallows - aviation, the world
Follow Me Here... - psychiatrist. A lot like me.
Gail Collins - NYT
Gwynne Dyer (NZH) - rabble rouser. Almost always right.
Hawks on Anthropology - like it says
I, Cringely - sometimes a bit eccentric. I worry about him. Almost always very interesting
Joel on Software
Leonard - economics
MN Bike Navig - local fave
Oatmeal - web comic
Paul Krugman - you know
Pphysics arXiv - best short science
Roger Ebert - intellectual, scholar, humanist
Salmon - business, news, journalist, economics
Shtetl-Optimized - computational physics
Talking Points - cutting edge politics
The Economist: Obituary - almost the only good part of a long dead journal
The Economist: SciTech - the other good part of a long dead journal
The Wirecutter - tech products, only the best
Top 25 - NYT Top 25
Whatever - Scalzi - science fiction
xkcd.com - unbelievably good
They mostly don't know me, but they are my salon. I'm a quiet sort of host. One or two are MN centric. I have Emily's Calendar feed in 'Core' too so I know when she adds events, but obviously there's no need to share that.
Many of my Pinboard/Twitter/Archive shares come from this set.
[1] Yes, Bundles still exist. Surprisingly. The view resermbles the old Reader Share view. There is some bugginess though; the widget for viewing the feed list is broken. I wonder if Google has forgotten this exists.
I get my "feeds" through the social networks - Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn, and any others that an aggregator app will support. I love Flipbook and it's visual appeal on iPhone and especially iPad. I haven't really evaluated google currents or Pulse since I find Flipbook so appealing with more than enough non-social feeds to choose from for me. Most of the lesser popular sites have a twitter feed so you just have to follow their twitter account.
ReplyDeleteThen there's StumbleUpon for discovering content both new and old, but I've got more than enough to flip through that's current.