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December 8, 2004
Less or More?
It's often thought that it's better to have more then to have less, but that's not always the case. Teri was going to Costco, our local warehouse store, to pick up a few things and I noted I was out of disposable razors and asked her to grab some for me. She came home with the smallest pack they had, 64 razors. Doesn't sound like a lot, but the only time I really use a bunch is in July when I have back to back camps, and I'll use 3 otherwise I use about 1 a month so 64 will last roughly 5 years. In the mean time, I have to store the razors, which will likely dump all over the place more than once and need to be picked up and of course, some will get lost.
I say that because having a bunch isn't necessarily a good thing, in fact, having less will sometimes give you more. When I began reading blogs and other websites, I had a list of about 10 (work related and for pleasure) that I visited each day. Enter RSS or site syndication and Awasu, my feed reader. Basically, my reader visits the site, gets a pared down version of what's on the site - just the content, not the design. I then can look at an even further pared down version, just the titles of new content and decide what I want to read. Less has blossomed into more - I now get content from more than 60 sites each day and it only takes a few moments to scan though and read what is helpful to me.
The reason I bring all of this up is not that 5 years of razors is too much or I want to encourage you to use Awasu, rather one of my favorite sites, blogs4God, is having a "dumping of the razors" problem. They began as a site that collected Christian blogs in an effort to give a focus to our voice in the blogosphere. The problem - as blogging grew, so did the number of entries (over 1300 now) - too many to be useful. Now, they're looking for a solution - a pairing down if you will.
They've offered up suggestions from starting over to shutting down. Personally, as exampled above, I like the thought of developing some sort of aggregated collection of sites, preferably one that's limited to sites that use RSS. This will not only ensure that there is less work to be done by the moderators (in the long run) but also that listed sites will be a more professional quality. I assume this because it'll take a little bit of effort on the part of the writer to make sure that their site uses XML and if they care enough for that, then they'll likely care enough to create decent posts. I believe that paring down will give the same effect for blogs4God that it did for me - more content and higher quality, but in a shorter time.
Of course, it could be over done and become a Christian Technorati. That may not be bad for some, but I find Technorati fairly useless when it comes to discovering emerging bloggers - or anything else useful for that matter.
While thinking about this, I realized this is an example of what I was talking about in "You're Not Lost" when I refered to the simultaneity of extremes. Moving to an XML/feed driven site is one extreme, shutting down is the other. Currently blogs4God is in the middle of the road and things in the middle of the road tend not to live long or look very good.
Lastly, if you happen to visit blogs4God forgive the look, Dean realizes that the site could use some work (it's been in the middle of the road for a while) and I'm sure site redesign will be on the table in conjunction with the data remodeling.
Posted by Jesse at December 8, 2004 8:17 PM