The League of Ordinary Gentlemen interviews Patrick Appel, one of the “underbloggers” at Andrew Sullivan’s blog. First of all, if you have an inferiority complex about your own blog when you read Andrew Sullivan’s blog, this interview will make you feel a lot better. Andrew Sullivan actually has three writers working on it full time — more than full time, really. Appel says he works on the site 10-14 hours a day.
There’s a ton of other great stuff, too, though. Here’s how Appel decides what’s worth linking to:
A few of the questions I ask myself when pondering whether to link to a post containing political opinion: is the writer intellectually honest? Is the post timely? Is the writer an expert on the subject? Is the perspective new and original? Would I want someone else to bring this post to my attention? Does this post help me better understand the news of the day? Does the post help me better understand a political, economic, scientific or philosophical concept? Is is accessible and well written? Does it help me understand an ideological viewpoint?
It’s a really interesting look at how blogs work these days at the largest scale. If you like the interview, you might also be interested in Sullivan’s own explanation of how his blog works.
RSS readers are for professionals
A lot of people are wondering about the relevance of RSS readers these days. These days, there are lots of ways to maintain a healthy flow of inbound information. Twitter is perhaps the hottest, but there are plenty of other options as well. And so a lot of people are wondering about the old standby — subscribing to feeds in an RSS reader. Read Write Web had a post this week, RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline. Dave Winer has taken the time to point out (again) that the river of news model is right, and the email client model is wrong.
And then this morning, I read the following in the Patrick Appel interview that I linked to in my previous post:
If you’re a serious consumer of information from a wide variety of sites, there’s still no substitute for subscribing to feeds in an RSS reader. Twitter is great, but it’s not the same. And I think that’s particularly true if you’re a blogger. If you’re just linking to the stuff that people are all talking about on Twitter or that floats to the top of Hacker News, you may as well give up on your blog, as far as I’m concerned. Everybody already sees that stuff. You have to dig deeper to offer more interesting information, and an RSS reader is the best tool you can use for that purpose.