Devoted readers may notice I don’t post here every day, and you may wonder – well what’s John up to then? Well, I’ve created a newsletter of sorts, a daily reading list with short commentary, called Signal. It’s an FM product and it lives here, at the Signal home page. Every day, I sort through hundreds of stories, most related to the Internet, media, and marketing world, and find ten or so that I find particularly noteworthy. I then annotate the links with a comment or two, and wrap the whole dealio up with a bow. You can subscribe to it as an email newsletter if you want, just put your mail up in the box on the right hand side of the page.
I decided to do this because I wish I had such a product myself, and so far, everything I’ve ever made has followed that simple directive. Let me know if it works for you.
FWIW, my Monday Signal is up, and it gives you a sense of what the service is all about. Hope you like it.
That’s great John, am sure you will uncover top stories that I would have not come across. Have subscribed via RSS.
I’ve been following along a bit, but TBH I find this sort of “bundle” packaging anachronistic. I also can’t stand people who write blog posts that go on and on and so on and so on until you start getting sick before they’ve even gotten to the point (which is quite often that there was no point… as in: “we don’t make your head think, our blog is just plain + simple boring filler with a pretty picture and a whole bunch of ads that we really want you to click — why don’t you? This BS we wrote here was obviously extremely disappointing, so maybe if you do you, the result might be more satisfying than reading this crap!” 😉
😀 nmw
I think the Signal is a great idea. I have found it very useful in keeping up with the *most important* stories in the industry. The Web is only getting more crowded and will continue to do so. Curating content, like you are doing for us, is a subject I have come across a lot lately in the blogosphere. Seems like it’s something worth thinking about. Thanks for being ahead of the curve.
It kind’ve bums me out that I have to follow you in multiple places. I put you in my RSS reader for a reason – So that all your stuff would be in one place.
@Dylan, would it help if I put a link to Signal onto this blog and/or into my Battellemedia.com feed?
I’m subscribed to both but if it were possible to incorporate both into one feed, that would be useful.
Cool.
John, I imagine you might be able to argue that
Domain Registrar
575 8th Avenue
New York, NY 10018
US
Phone: +1.9027492701
is squatting on johnbattelle.com
Perhaps you could use johnbattelle.com to create a John Battelle commercial firehose!
;D nmw
@John – It would be very helpful to me personally if a link to the signal showed up in the same feed as this blog. I loved reading the signal each day, but find that I miss it/don’t think of it often enough.
The best of all worlds to me would be if The Signal showed up in it’s full form in this RSS feed as well, but I recognize that you’ve got other reasons for posting it over at FM.
Hard as it sounds, I agree with Norbert Mayer-Wittmann. The truth is that there are a lot of blogs about all kinds of subjects that do not cover any relevant information tha can be considered as worth reading. A nice layout, an attractive image and the ads are not enough content to make a blog. And a talented narrating style is not enough either. The information has to give something valuable to the reader other than attract them with lame and repetitive information.
It might not be the case here, but unfortunately this is the standard.