Of course one creates just for the pleasure of it, with no audience other than oneself in mind.1 And yet, having an actual audience of living, breathing people interested enough in what one has created to give it some of their precious currency is a wonderful reward and a spur to action. When the...
Feeding Our Reading Habits, a long and fascinating article by Alex Kessinger, whom I know as @voidfiles on app.net, set me thinking, as it was surely intended to do. Ostensibly about RSS readers, one of the least understood and most useful tools of the internet, the article is also about how and why an RSS reader can be a good thing, and in the course of settting out a draft manifesto for a new kind of RSS reader, Alex discusses some of the things readers ought to be able to do, and some of the things you ought to be able to do with them.
I'm not going to attempt to summarise those points; if you've come this far, you owe it to yourself to go and read the article in full. Instead, here are the thoughts it provoked in me.
Last night, we came home to a burst water main and the street awash. This morning, the street below was dry and so were the taps in the house. Luckily, there was enough old water in the kettle for a cup of tea each (though not the customary two) or else we'd probably be lying there still, parched. Taking the dog out, therefore, I loaded my backpack with an empty 5-litre demijohn and set off.
We spent a wonderful weekend at Ravello, on the Amalfi coast, gorgeous despite rain on and off all day Saturday. Among the delights, one of the best menu manglings ever.
Over on ADN a couple of days ago there was a long and convoluted discussion 1 around the general topic of how to reward serious, or high-quality, news-gathering. Many elements are at play, from the nature of "high-quality" to the nature of "reward," and all of them got a good go-around. One of the elements that didn't surface for quite a while, though, was that good news has never been paid for solely by those who consume it. Advertising, government grants, and a few deep pockets have all helped to pay journalists to do their thing. And today?
