Filtering AOL
9th July 2003
Burningbird starts a discussion on how much harm the addition of AOL users will cause to the blogging eco-system. She compares this development to the chaos caused when AOL users were first introduced to Usenet. I don’t see that there’s a problem. To my mind, the thing that separates blogging from the many other forms of internet discussion (forums, Usenet, mailing lists etc) is that it comes with its own built in filtering mechanisms. I’ll take myself as an example. While I don’t use an aggregator, I do use my blogroll to keep track of roughly 70 bloggers who have a very high signal to noise ratio. Through them, I am frequently directed to other bloggers of a similar calibre. I’ve seen it claimed that there are over half a million blogs on the ’net, but the social network I maintain through my blogroll means that while I only see a fraction of those, that fraction tracks most of the information of interest to me.
If AOL add another million blogs that don’t carry information of interest to me, that’s fine; I probably won’t even notice. Not until one of them posts something interesting, and one of the 70+ blogs I read points me in their direction.
More recent articles
- Weeknotes: Embeddings, more embeddings and Datasette Cloud - 17th September 2023
- Build an image search engine with llm-clip, chat with models with llm chat - 12th September 2023
- LLM now provides tools for working with embeddings - 4th September 2023
- Datasette 1.0a4 and 1.0a5, plus weeknotes - 30th August 2023
- Making Large Language Models work for you - 27th August 2023
- Datasette Cloud, Datasette 1.0a3, llm-mlc and more - 16th August 2023
- How I make annotated presentations - 6th August 2023
- Weeknotes: Plugins for LLM, sqlite-utils and Datasette - 5th August 2023
- Catching up on the weird world of LLMs - 3rd August 2023
- Run Llama 2 on your own Mac using LLM and Homebrew - 1st August 2023