"Tweaking your filters is job No. 1"

Andrew Leonard in Salon (subscription or “daily pass” required) explains exactly why blogs are so important to me:

Thoma and Salmon, like DeLong, are prolific bloggers. Line up enough of these pre-processors in your blog aggregator, as I do, and you get the benefit of a bevy of smart people filtering the critical news of the day — and then deconstructing, critiquing and otherwise adding value to that information. What would once have required taking an article from the Wall Street Journal or New York Times or Financial Times into a graduate level seminar and having it taken apart by a professor and a few other bright students is now available, in infinitely greater scope and detail, for free, on every subject of interest to humanity. For my own project here, striving to better understand globalization, the ongoing assembly of rank upon rank of pre-processors on a network of related subjects — the economy, China, India, energy and the environment, and intellectual property — has become a vital part of my daily explorations. In the age of information overload, tweaking your filters is job No. 1.

One thought on “"Tweaking your filters is job No. 1"

  1. Felix

    It’s worth noting that we bloggers are MUCH happier and MUCH more productive doing pre-processing than we ever would be sitting in a graduate-level seminar. Blogging has taken something which used to be a luxury for the elites and turned it into something available to all — with all the concomitant network effects that implies.

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