Some readers may have noticed from the “sticky” permanent post at the top of Troppo’s front page that we’ve revived the old Missing Link feature in two separate forms:
- a weekly themed digest by Don Arthur;
- a daily Twitter-based service compiled mostly by me and delivered via Nicholas Gruen’s Twitter subscription.
Now I’ve also managed to configure the Twitter-based Missing Link Daily to display in an online newspaper format available from paper.li. It looks quite nifty and is quick and painless to produce, although the categorisation is a tad random and you’re probably best to check the list view (“see all articles”) to make sure you view all recommended reading for the day.
The rationale for both forms of Missing Link is a fairly basic one but worth spelling out again. Many if not most potential blog readers don’t have either the time or inclination to plough through mountains of drivel cluttering the blogosphere to find the numerous but scattered instances of great writing. There are several sites that rate blog posts by reader rating/voting but I remain to be convinced that this form of quality rating is terribly useful. At most they produce lowest common denominator selections. Missing Link OTOH is unashamedly subjective in its selection method: Don and I respectively choose blog posts we personally assess as worth reading (for a variety of reasons). I currently scan 261 blogs and alternative media sites each day to compile Missing Link Daily, aiming to select between 10 and 20 posts or articles especially worth reading.
I am hoping that other bloggers will increasingly recognise (and therefore promote and participate in) Missing Link as an entirely altruistic venture and not one designed to boost traffic to Troppo. In any event the paper.li/Twitter-based Missing Link Daily is completely separate from Troppo.
So that’s what the ML in all those tweets are.
You can also edit your paper.li settings to have it come out weekly or monthly. You can actively promote it on your twitter stream each time it comes out too.
Senexx
I always preface each morning Missing Link tweets with one announcing that “Today’s Missing Link Daily recommended blog/alt media recommendations follow”. Nevertheless it’s likely that some other members of Nicholas’s flock may also be a bit confused. Hopefully they’ll all soon get used to it.
Thanks for the advice re paper.li . I think I’ll leave it at a daily compilation for the moment. Weekly or monthly would mean that selections would mostly be drastically out of date by the time readers found out about them. Any other tips and tricks you’ve discovered?
I currently scan 261 blogs and alternative media sites each day to compile Missing Link Daily, aiming to select between 10 and 20 posts or articles especially worth reading.
Wow, how long does it take you Ken, and how much is ‘incremental’ for Missing Link – ie, without ML, how much surfing would you do?
If you use a feed reader (Google Reader) it doesn’t take all that long. About an hour before bed and a little less first thing in the morning. I’ve selected 16 just now of which probably 10 will make the final cut in the morning. Scanning isn’t the same as reading. I only read the posts that look interesting on a quick glance and quite a few can be eliminated without even that. I did ML as part of a small team for a couple of years and became quite efficient at it. Then I got sick of it and stopped until now. That included mostly stopping most blog browsing until very recently. If I wasn’t doing ML I would only spend around 30 minutes a day max in browsing and would mostly only bother to check blogs where I could expect to find interesting posts frequently.
No other tips or tricks I’m afraid Ken. Oh just one actually. You can set the time of day it comes out.
Beyond that just that that you can’t pick and choose daily, weekly, monthly or time that your paper.li paper comes out if you use a hashtag basis for your paper.
And that doesn’t really apply to Missing Link.