However I’m a little alarmed by the thought that this change might result in 3000 entries a month. One of the things I like about Writer River is that there’s not too much of it. The entries are well selected and nicely targeted.

I can only spend so much of my time reading up about technical communication and I know that, when I do have some time for reading, I can go to Writer River and be informed or entertained, without wasting time browsing through lots of pages before I find something interesting.

For me, Writer River works as a sort of a “Best Of” site.

The thought of Writer River becoming bloated with entries reminds me of a technical communicator I was following for a while on twitter. At first I was impressed by the volume of links he pumped out into the twittersphere. But pretty soon, although some of what he tweeted about was interesting, I began to find it irritating that I was spending time searching through his links for things that were worth reading. I realised that the trouble was he was not applying much of a filter. After a while I found I was just scrolling past his batches of tweets to find those from people with something interesting to say or to pass on. Eventually I decided this was ridiculous and I unfollowed him, which made me feel bad.

But sometimes less is more.

Perhaps something of the sort you suggest? Your site gets content more quickly, more easily. Ours follows with some selectivity, more detailed metadata, and slower incorporation of detailed content. Perhaps we articulate these in our missions, somehow?

And find a way to link back and forth when there’s overlap? We could parse your aggregated RSS feed. And there’s probably some way you could incorporate our feeds into your aggregator? Doing this without duplicating entries would be tricky, since neither of our feeds include original URLs, but link to our respective sites’ ‘detail’ pages. Hmm.

What do readers think?

I think that if people have to tag the content with so much data to get it onto Writer River, the increased effort will decrease the amount of participation. I want to make this effortless. At the same time, you’re right — a giant repository of links isn’t very usable. If you have any ideas about how these two could work in tandem, I would love to hear it.

If we’re all going to benefit from assembling a database of links we all wish to use, we’ll need additional metadata. At the TC Library we collect four levels of category, as well as author, publisher, and year published (none of which is contained in most RSS feeds).

We have an XSLT for importing RSS content from diverse feeds into a ‘pending’ database, which humans must tag and categorize before they’re released into the public ‘TC Library’ index. That way, we can implement a carefully-planned content strategy, rather than simply use the limited features offered by the software — such as Yahoo Pipes and the thousands of RSS feeds already online.

Maybe you’d look into developing something like this for Writer River? It really would make your collection more useful for browsing, searching, and later collections of links. And now would be a good time for this, rather than after you’ve added thousands of uncategorized posts?

I could be wrong; I may misunderstand your content strategy for the Writer River database. But I’ve been doing this for years, and I can (and do) very strongly recommend rich tagging of content.