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Why blogs should cover some topics randomly
Think of a blog as competing with both Google and Wikipedia, among other aggregators. If you knew you wanted to read about "the minimum wage," you could bypass Tyler and Alex and Google to the best entries (some of which might include us, of course). But with Google and Wikipedia you must choose the topic. A good blog writer can randomize the topic for you, much like a good DJ controls the sequence of the music. Sometimes you might trust us more than you trust other aggregators, but we can't count on that and arguably the other aggregators improve at a rate faster than we do.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 30, 2008 at 01:39 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
Speaking of random blog fodder .. Gordon Ramsay Nearly Drowned in Iceland Cliff Accident!!!
(I think the other important bit is to post daily ... something you guys have down.)
Posted by: odograph at Jul 30, 2008 1:49:50 PM
(I should have mentioned the tie-in, that Gordon was puffin hunting)
Posted by: odograph at Jul 30, 2008 1:50:37 PM
Volokh.com made by day with a story and graphic two years ago titled "Can Giant Rabbits Save North Korean Communism?"
http://www.volokh.com/posts/1171255468.shtml
Posted by: Michael F. Martin at Jul 30, 2008 1:59:40 PM
Yes, but computers can randomly choose content too.
Posted by: mk at Jul 30, 2008 2:14:23 PM
Oh dear, my comment seems to have been deleted due to too high link-to-wordcount ratio.
But anyways, computers can randomly select content too (itunes, google news, digg).
Posted by: mk at Jul 30, 2008 2:19:44 PM
On the topic of aggregation and search and trust networks, there is a company called Lijit who allows for easy searching within a set of content that you trust. It's really just an "easy to use" wrapper around the Google Custom Search Engine with a slice of optimized revenue sharing (and they take some of what would normally be your revenue, under CSE), but I still think it's pretty fun.
Posted by: greggles at Jul 30, 2008 2:24:46 PM
Have you seen this?
Posted by: meter at Jul 30, 2008 2:26:10 PM
Editorial discretion is quite different from pure randomization. One goes to aggregating blogs in order to let someone else decide what's worth reading. One could say much the same for magazines, university presses, and the like.
Posted by: editor at Jul 30, 2008 3:55:34 PM
This post made my day. Flying Puffin, indeed!
Posted by: at Jul 30, 2008 4:33:24 PM
I think there is a distinction to what is actually random. For example, while reading an article in wikipedia, about one unrelated thing--say, price controls, there would be a meta link to another article about some author related to that field. That authors article would reveal to me that he was also known for this one incident, and then, two or three clicks later I would arrive at a Flying Puffin.
While, yes, the DJ analogy holds true, there are also linear degrees of randomness to wikipedia.
Posted by: f tiaka at Jul 30, 2008 4:35:03 PM
Well, yes -- I read MR because of the authors and the general distribution of topics, not because I want specific information. And of course I read all my blogs via RSS, so that the (per article) cost of reading a blog which has very infrequent articles is the same as the cost of reading a very active blog. RSS has the additional advantages that you can quickly ignore an article based on its title, and tend not to see comments, which are time consuming to read but often less valuable than the article.
Posted by: Tom Davies at Jul 30, 2008 7:20:06 PM
" A good blog writer can randomize the topic for you, much like a good DJ controls the sequence of the music"
Try not to make it too random. I would love if you talked a bit about Cybernations, though. We need more players.
Consider this my best attempt at "hawking." :P
Posted by: Robert Olson at Jul 31, 2008 12:21:27 AM
If you are so inclined, Wikipedia actually has a "Random Article" feature in the left-hand navigation of its main page. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) Granted, it doesn't randomize within a topic, but I still find it to be a very effective time sink. :)
Posted by: econgirl at Jul 31, 2008 10:00:32 AM
Why should bloggers bother to write the article? Why not just suggest a topic to google? More importantly, see StumbleUpon: www.stumbleupon.com.
Posted by: anonadog at Jul 31, 2008 11:43:22 AM
Actually, for academic work, a relevant academic blog is much more useful. If I search my econ blogs for a topic I want to write about, I can usually get at least one name or citation to look at. I can then follow that citation, look at its works cited and search from there for the relevant information. By plowing through a few papers like this, I begin to see the persistently cited papers that matter more, can read these and get a good idea of a topic and know where to depart from in formal research.
Good luck doing that efficiently with Google or Wikipedia.
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