Thursday, May 21, 2009

Blog Surfing

You may remember that a few months back I posted about Newser and the joys of pretending to be omniscient thanks to the Internet. But, of course you can't really claim to know everything just because a website constantly monitors thousands of news sources and writes pithy synopses for you on every important story (and many more that are worthless fluff -- but you can filter those out). No, no, it would be arrogant of me even to think that. After all, there are all those Blogs out there to monitor too!

But now, thanks to those little ads at the side of my Facebook page, I've discovered Condron.us -- a site that enables me to watch the blogs and maybe find a couple of good ones. There have always been blog directories, and blog review sites, and blog search engines. And there are sites where you can click through a blizzard of random blogs; Blogger has it's own version of that right at the top of my blog. But they all have one fatal flaw: I have to do something for them to work.

Condron is different. And the same. Appealing both to our eternal, profound longing for ever more literate observations on the human condition and to our inner couch potato, Condron combines both. Essentially, I sit there and Condron scrolls through the most recently updated blogs on Blogger and WordPress at 6 second intervals (which can be adjusted). If I see one that looks interesting I can stop the rotation and read it, or bookmark it using every tool imaginable including just emailing it to myself. To use the analogy they keep using on their site, it's like channel surfing without ever having to push any buttons. It's like setting your browser on Scan.

And then there's the small matter of the traffic. If you submit your site to Condron then it's in the rotation too. The occasional person is interested in your Blog, and perhaps they add it to their Feedburner. They tell their friends who tell their friends and soon you have a lively, burgeoning community commenting on your intriguing thoughts and dropping your bon mots at classy cocktail parties. In no time you come to the attention of the literati, receive a book deal, and spend the rest of your life writing for Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair while appearing on talk shows to comment on the current world situation. You also slip the occasional sardonic contribution to the Onion but don't allow them to print your name.

And all because of Condron.us.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

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Anonymous said...

very use full information. thank you.

Anonymous said...

Cool post! How much stuff did you have to look up in order to write this one? I can tell you put some work in.

Anonymous said...

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