I am really looking through thousands of blog posts, news articles, and social media posts looking for the gems. The bar is much higher for what I curate. I am not looking to have my finger on the pulse of what is happening not so I can meet my daily deadlines of blog posts, or weekly curated lists, it is just to find the most interesting ideas, people, companies, and trends I possibly can. I wouldn’t be curating articles for sharing as a list of what is happening, or even writing stories (sometimes I might), but this round is about feeding my knowledge and ideas for my new podcast Breaking Changes. This time what I would be curating would be for very different reasons. Last month I fired up a brand new Feedly account so that I could rebuild my feeds in a new way. Finding Purpose and Meaning in My Feeds Again Ultimately I feel this is what led to me falling out of love with the work-it became an (unapaid) job I had to do for someone else. I wasn’t just doing it for my own knowledge anymore, and I felt compelled to make sure I had done the work every week for everybody else, which ultimately began to consume my weekends. I did this for a couple of years, but over time I realized that it had changed the essence of why I was curating information. So I began taking everything I had curated by Sunday night each week and publishing as a list of relevant API news grouped by topic. I was able to introduce some significant refinements in my process that allowed me to curate, tag, and organize what I was consuming each day so that I could more easily search across the archives, and I thought, “why don’t I share this with my audience”. By that time I had a sprawling system I called “laneworks” for profiling APIs, and the building blocks they were using to deliver their API Operations, so it made sense for me to use the same platform for processing the RSS feeds of blog and news feeds I had formerly been consuming via Google Reader. Once Google Reader went away I wasn’t happy with the alternative feed readers of the time and decided to build my own.
Curating Feeds For Consumption by Other People This felt like a worthy approach to making sense of what was happening, and one that along with Twitter, kept me with a steady stream of readers who were tuned into what I had to say each day, making my feeds something that had a positive impact on my life. This is how I made a name for myself in the emerging API universe, by aggregating, curating, and then distilling down what I saw in my Google Reader, and then published stories of what I thought for others to consume. Then I would write about what I saw in real time, publishing upwards of 3-5 blog posts each day on API Evangelist. I would consume the feeds of API pioneers like Amazon, eBay, and Salesforce, as well as the upcoming Github, Twilio, Stripes, and other API upstarts. My GMail and Google Reader were open all day and I consumed hundreds or thousands of feeds each day. When I first started studying the world of APIs in 2010, Google Reader was the way that I learned about what was happening. But, in recent weeks I am finding a renewed love of reading my feeds, something that is more about why I do it, over the technology of how I do it, and it is something I wanted to write about so that I could have a snapshot of what brought me back around to working my way through hundreds or thousands of posts each day to find those gems that matter. Since then I have had little interest in looking into Feedly or reading news from across the tech sector and beyond. I lost interest in why I enjoyed doing it, and just didn’t believe it was worthwhile anymore. Somewhere in 2018 or 2019 I began falling out of love with processing my feeds each day. I built the awareness that came along with API Evangelist using my Google Reader and RSS feeds, and when Google deprecated the application I developed my own custom solution for consuming feeds.
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