Essay #3: Two Years of 2.0
I started seriously following web trends a few months before 2008. Now 2+ years later, I’ve deleted 500 bookmarks from my Delicious, almost a couple hundred+ tagged items from my main Reader account, and another couple hundred labeled as TODO from my browser bookmarks, stored by XMarks. Now, hours later, I still have another couple hundred items in my ReadItLater list, although somewhat sanely manageable and accessible. And I’m fanning the flame by writing a long review, hoping some upstart doing websites out there will find use in it.
Overall, I feel like all web news, lessons, and exhibitions was useful. I learned lots stuff good. But I spent much time and still missed some golden opportunities. On several occasions mostly in Delicious, I had duplicated entries perhaps only months apart. A number of the items I had as TODO were horrible write-ups on WordPress and jQuery “tricks” that were (in terms of screen estate) 20% awful UI, 40% yes-men comments, 30% ads, and 10% content. Only now do I realize how shallow those authors’ knowledge were, as I eventually outgrew the usefulness of my gathered resources. So yes, I should have organized better (more on that), but there is a definitely content quality issue with sites out there. Oh, and I’m also pissed FFFFound has no RSS feed.
Seems like posters of late don’t take the time to write and grow content but instead just put up link bait to worsen the quality of RSS feeds. Delicious Popular, back in 2007, did not look as it does today. Back then, since the web was less spammed up by WordPress strip malls, the content gathered by (what I’m assuming is and has been) an automatically ranked feed of popular pages on Delicious based on times bookmarked. As a result, the content was quite good, and I learned a lot about mashups, and startups, and CSS standards, and even design patterns and separation of concerns. Back then, there were no Noupe, Cats Who Code, etc., and point is, now my attention has shifted to Hacker News and a selected group of consistently good bloggers writers. Still, little by little the WordPress spammers are creeping in. I really don’t know how they do it, and I don’t think HN is very automated…
