Comments on: News Feed Aggregators: There Is Nothing Beyond the Text

By: Kate

Kate — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 12:34:10 +0000

It’s a tough medium, blogs. See, people have set them up to be opinionated, which I guess doesn’t have to require footnotes (although I would love to see footnotes!) but it’s gotten to the point where it’s mere opinions. It’s like getting in an argument with someone who heard something somewhere and is spitting out rhetoric and when you ask them about it, they can’t go two sentences deep with their argument (because they have none!). Should blogging be so surface? If so, most blogs are not going to be looked at as substantial or legitimate, which might be a future problem

By: Chris Abraham

Chris Abraham — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 14:37:00 +0000

What I am going to add as a result of your response is that I believe that the blogosphere has become lazy. It isn’t doing what you suggest, which is to say, footnotes and endnotes, but rather is outsourcing all of the context. Saying things like:

SUBJECT: I hate Bush!!!!
SUMMARY: That son of a bitch is a _real ass_.
POST: Nothing

With the _real ass_ being the hyperlink. It is all context and reading it through an aggregator client means I will generally (mostly) skip over it as a waste of time. Stopping requires more content, less context. The same thing with the subject/title of the article should be descriptive. So many of them never are. And many are far from accurate.

In fact, most of the posts that are the least effective are only tone, color, and emotion… outsourcing the content and context to the anchor (or target) article.

By: Kate

Kate — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 14:29:12 +0000

It does make sense. A few things though. Being a historian, the context of a piece of writing is CRUCIAL to taking the information in. You cannot take a piece of writing and use it for research if you don’t do that, or you will be digging yourself a nice little hole that’s wide open for bombardment by critics!

I think you touch on that though (by saying that you still need to take into account writers from the left or the right etc). In fact, by taking the context of a piece of writing into account, it in some ways makes you LESS bias and LESS likely to take the information at face value.

For instance, if I were to read an entourage about how horrible President Bush is from someone like Michael Moore, and I knew it was him, then I would be less apt to just suck up the information as point-blank.

HOWEVER, by taking things at a less contextual level, it also does force you to analyze the content on it’s own, but unfortunately I think there aren’t enough people willing to do that to make an almost non contextual read really effective (people are lazy, and they really suck sometimes).

Other than that though, I think that the idea in general definitely has it’s benefits, especially for people with biases or prejudices (but that’s a whole other problem that can’t be solved by contentualizing (I made that up) a piece).