kottke.org at Twenty
Speaking of long-running Web sites, Kottke.org recently celebrated its 20th birthday (Hacker News).
But had I not written all those posts, good and bad, I wouldn’t be who I am today, which, hopefully, is a somewhat wiser person vectoring towards a better version of himself. What the site has become in its best moments — a slightly highfalutin description from the about page: “[kottke.org] covers the essential people, inventions, performances, and ideas that increase the collective adjacent possible of humanity” — has given me a chance to “try on” hundreds of thousands of ideas, put myself into the shoes of all kinds of different thinkers & creators, meet some wonderful people (some of whom I’m lucky enough to call my friends), and engage with some of the best readers on the web (that’s you!), who regularly challenge me on and improve my understanding of countless topics and viewpoints.
I also enjoyed Jason Kottke’s interview with John Gruber on The Talk Show (tweet).
3 Comments RSS · Twitter
This is not a trolling post. I’m confused - Kottke doesn’t “write” the majority of the posts. The majority are a link to someone else’s content. What does Kottke actually *do*?
Sure sounds like trolling to me. But I'll bite. He is a curator of interesting content and it is not just links, it's is almost always with a short but valuable comment. Much like Michal is doing with this blog.
When time is one of our most precious resources blogs like Kottkes and this reduces the wasting of time, and that benefits a lot of visitors.
I would say that in addition to curation and providing valuable commentary, Kottke does a lot of summarizing and contextualizing. I used to do more of that here, but it was very time consuming for me, and I was not especially pleased with the results. So I have some appreciation for someone who can do it well, and Kottke is really, really good at it.
