SlowNews: a good, too-short idea

Tuesday 23 March 2010 — This is close to 15 years old. Be careful.

Back in January, Kevin Dangoor had a good idea:

The move toward real-time everything is wrong. We have enough interruptions in our days without having random links and news sprayed at us 24×7. Not to mention that there’s no real thought that goes into real time, and generally very little thought that gets compressed into 140 characters. Length also does not guarantee quality, and too much text can be a waste of time. The trick is to be concise.

[SlowNews is] a weekly post for software developers and technically minded product managers. This is a way to keep up with interesting things that are happening, but through the lens of a weekly view where the uninteresting is edited away, the more interesting is promoted to the top and a bit of commentary ties it all together.

I was very pleased to see Kevin take this on. I find it impossible to stay on top of all the headlines blasting toward me. A news stream that’s just a small pace behind the firehose is just what I want. The hype has a chance to boil away a bit, and some connections and reflection have a chance to gain a foothold.

Unfortunately, just a month later, Kevin ended SlowNews. So I’m looking for other sources of thoughtful and measured industry news. Maybe someone else wants to pick up the banner of SlowNews?

» 4 reactions

Comments

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Eli 11:40 AM on 24 Mar 2010
There was also the left fold: http://www.foldl.org/ with a similar idea (digests from reddit/YC etc.) but it also ended prematurely, unfortunately.
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Ned Batchelder 12:05 PM on 24 Mar 2010
Left Fold looks like it would have been a good resource, though maybe too much of just a digest, a little more commentary would be helpful.

Maybe I'm hoping for too much...
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Aron 9:26 AM on 25 Mar 2010
SlowNews would have been nice. One problem with that sort of news summarization is that it's hard to find a source that sufficiently intersects with my interests. I'd actually be willing to pay for a high quality subscription service where I could manage what snippets were included in my personalized newsletter using tags...

Presently I read http://lwn.net for Linux news, a couple tagged RSS feeds from gizmodo for gadgets, and http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/top/.rss to get some idea of what's happening in the Python world. The reddit feed shows up pretty badly in my inbox, though, so whenever I get a round tuit I'll write a filter to transform the articles into something directly readable...
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Steve Conover 4:05 PM on 28 Mar 2010
We have a pretty good ruby/agile feed we run at Pivotal:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/pivotal-news-network

The upside is it's people's shared items, which hopefully means its fairly high quality. The possible downside is it's a lot of shared items. People tend to blast through it.

Though from what you've written here it seems like a filter on that kind of feed is really what you want. I'd like to see more people sharing off of RSS feeds, acting like editors, then people editing on those edited feeds, mixing/remixing, paring down and scaling up. Nobody's really figured out the right formula to make that happen yet...I hope/expect it to be the future of all this newsreading stuff, though.

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