Six People in My (Virtual) Neighborhood
This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. A longing indicates that something is missing in our lives. What is missing is the sound of the human voice.
David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto
A year ago, I used to get most of my information from a variety of traditional and new media sources primarily via Google Reader. Now, loathe as I am to admit it, Twitter has replaced it as my primary aggregator, and the mix of sources is very different, too.
This past weekend, I did a major purge of my RSS feeds in Reader, clearing out more than 2/3rds of them (now down to 61 feeds), including some that were duplicates of Twitter feeds I follow, and many others I realized weren’t terribly essential when a hectic day found me hitting “Mark all as read” on 1,000+ items. But while Twitter is good for taking the pulse of the moment and flashes of conversation (or debate), I still look to blogs for more thoughtful insight and, increasingly, a sense of community.
I’ve noted before that Twitter is a great professional networking tool, more cocktail party than office, and the people I follow there are primarily in publishing and marketing, but there’s a specific subset of which I’ve become particularly fond: writers with great blogs.
