My life (well, okay: my Web existence) changed when I discovered Brent Simmons’ NetNewsWire. Being able to quickly scan through the headlines from 60 or 70 Web sites in fifteen minutes is truly devo-licious. It’s also helped eliminate a lot of the aimless browsing I used to get trapped in every morning as I went around to all of my bookmarked sites.
One site whose RSS feed I have subscribed to is the Blogdex. As an aggregator of all that is hot and linked (as pornographic as that sounds), it used to be a good barometer of worthy browsing.
So, let’s see what the headlines are these days:
Scientist burns penis with hot laptop
Piqua’s library has to flesh out its own Web site
Report of sex in kindergarten investigated
Police find 17 sex toys in local woman’s car
Porn shows up in businessman’s slide show
(These were all in the top ten when I checked Blogdex.)
Let’s compare to what Blogdex reported in the top ten a year ago:
US shuts down Somalia Internet
Adbusters: Buy nothing day
Food Fight (an article about consumerism in Iraq)
A List Apart: Reading Design
(A Japanese site for some fancy, geeky watch)
More and more, Blogdex is listing the kind of sensationalistic tripe found most often in the pages of the supermarket tabloids.
Is this another sign of the increasing mainstreaming of the Blog world? Or, has it always been like this but I’ve never noticed?
