The paradox of choice
I’ve just finished reading The paradox of choice
The Paradox of Choice and Blink are at the same time very different and very similar books. Blink is more entertaining: to make his point, Malcolm Gladwell tells really good stories. Barry Schwartz lists numbers, studies, and results. Blink is about rapid decision making. The Paradox of choice is about deliberate (and often excruciating) decision making. But the two books cite many of the same studies and, most importantly, they both have a strong and urgent moral message to communicate.
Blink’s message is that the ill effects of snap judgement (bias, stereotyping, and “momentary autism”) can and should be reduced through awareness and training. The Paradox of choice wants to prove that we could be so much happier if we just stopped being so picky and avoided comparing ourselves only to people who are doing better than we are. Happiness, says Schwartz, comes from finding the time to be grateful for what we have and content with our “good enough” lives.
By the way, does anybody have recommendations for recent good books on decision making?
[Oh, I almost forgot: What would Nancy White say about all this?]
How to find good blogs?
It seems that there was a lot of talking at Blogher about the Technorati Top 100 list and how this list does not represent the world of bloggers (at least not the world of women bloggers, or mommy bloggers, or african-american bloggers, teenage bloggers, and so on; see, for example at the transcripts and debate around the session Play by today’s rules or change the game?). This “list of everything” seems to have a strong young male/hi-tech bias and, even more importantly, it cannot be used as a guide to find good blogs for everybody. As Christopher Carfi puts it, Technorati ranking is based on quantity (number of links) and not on quality (rating of the blog or post). And even if the superlist had really the best blogs on the planet, it still would not be the list of blogs that you enjoy reading every day.
[By the way, Technorati ranking is broken. First, let me make clear that I am not into ranking. I firmly deny that I wake up in the morning and spend one hour looking at who has linked to me since the day before (this seems like a good opportunity to thank Jay Rosen, Nancy White, Derek Miller, Robert Scoble, Funkygrl, and all the other linkers.)
(Note to self: find a way to link to Nancy White in any future post I write.)
Anyway, I just happened to notice that Technorati has not updated my ranking in ages. In the last few weeks I have been linked quite a bit but my linking status in Technorati has stalled at "18 links from 14 site." You must be kidding! People have been linking to me and I can prove it!]
A few days ago, my friend and brand new blogger Funkygrl asked if I had any suggestions on to find good political blogs. She had been reading blogs and concluded that most of them are frankly not that good and/or interesting.
Here are some of strategies I’ve used to find blogs I like. I search for keywords or tags that I am interested in (there are various sites that allow you to search for blogs such as: Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket, Bloglines, Clusty). You need to do some leg work and read through the search results to find something you like. Then, you can look at the site blogroll; or go on Bloglines, see who subscribes to that blog , and browse their blogrolls (people who read this blog also read…). You can follow links in the blog posts to other friendly blogs.
There is del.icio.us, although I still quite don’t get how to use it correctly (would some kind soul give me some step-by-step instructions?). There is the Firefox extension Stumbleupon: you indicate your interests, and Stumbleupon presents you with sites that have been positively rated by others surfers and then learns from your ratings.
And now, how do you find good blogs?
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