Seth Godin:

Other than writing a daily blog (a practice that’s free, and priceless), reading more blogs is one of the best ways to become smarter, more effective and more engaged in what’s going on. The last great online bargain.

Good blogs aren’t focused on the vapid race for clicks that other forms of social media encourage. Instead, they patiently inform and challenge, using your time with respect.

Here’s the thing: Google doesn’t want you to read blogs. They shut down their RSS reader and they’re dumping many blog subscriptions into the gmail promo folder, where they languish unread.

And Facebook doesn’t want you to read blogs either. They have cut back the organic sharing some blogs benefitted from so that those bloggers will pay to ‘boost’ their traffic to what it used to be.

Mi accodo. Nessuna alternativa agli rss — che sia Facebook, che sia Twitter — vale quanto la lista di blog e feed rss che negli anni mi sono costruito, fatta di opinioni che posso ricondurre a persone, fatta da siti piccoli meno ossessionati dal numero di pagine viste. Iscriversi a un feed rss è come iscriversi a una persona e alle sue idee. Come scriveva Anil Dash tempo fa l’unità fondamentale di un blog non è l’articolo, l’unità fondamentale di un blog è lo stream. Non è il singolo articolo a renderlo interessante, ma l’insieme degli articoli che si susseguono.

È un vero peccato che dalla morte di Google Reader in poi siano caduti in disuso — sono una cosa per geek, per addetti ai lavori, e neppure credo oramai che abbiamo molte possibilità di battere le alternative basate su algoritmi. Se avete smesso di utilizzarli vi invito però a ridargli una chance: tutto sta nella selezione di alcune fonti non rumorose ma valide.

E se siete alla ricerca di un client, per me il migliore è Feedbin.

(via Andrea Contino)

La cascata d’informazione non filtrata e ordinata cronologicamente a cui ci ha abituato Twitter, Instagr.am, i blog prima e Facebook poi è un modo sempre più inefficace di processare e organizzare l’informazione online, scrive Casey Johnston:

The feed arose as a simple way to take advantage of the new possibilities of the web. How should information be sorted when it’s being created continually, and not in packaged issues or editions? Early on, putting content in a long list according to the time it was posted made the most sense. It’s the easiest way to organize anything, ever: You just make a pile, and the oldest stuff is at the bottom. It was a perfect paradigm for social networks: It’s transparent, so you don’t need to explain to your users how it works. It fits nicely on a smartphone. Best of all, it encourages people to constantly refresh, which reads as a certain kind of engagement.

Unfortunately, chronological order doesn’t scale well. Once a medium or platform has had its here-comes-everyone moment, the stuff you actually want to see gets buried in an undifferentiated stream — imagine a library organized chronologically, or even the morning edition of a newspaper. People are doing too many things and they are happening all at once, and the once-coherent experience of people using a platform unravels into noise.

Nel momento in cui un servizio raggiunge un numero considerevole di utenti, il rumore diventa troppo forte e non solo si fa fatica a tenersi aggiornati ma si fa anche fatica a capire con chi si ha a che fare — con chi si sta comunicando:

And, as it turns out, the same neutrality and transparency that made time-based sorting so appealing can be a particular liability for social media. It’s an established fact of social media services that, once they reach enough size that the potential audience for a post becomes nebulous, people shy from posting on them, because they can’t predict what reaction they’ll get. This — called “context collapse” — is why we’ve seen group messaging services boom as broader social media ones have flattened; in your Slack or HipChat or GroupMe, you know how your friends or family will react to a link you post. On an open and unfiltered social media feed, the outcome of posting to a public is far too unpredictable.