Preface - I've been really busy lately, and am just catching up on the my blog reading while flying out to the East Coast. Thanks to RSSBandit and w.Bloggar offline reading and posting works pretty smoothly.

So - Slashgeo gets 1,000,000 hits. woo. DrkSide has a great point - how does this matter? What value has been added? GISDirtbag points out what I've always thought - SlashGeo is mainly forwarding other posts. On top of that, they are mostly from Directions, which is 50% forwarding other posts, and 50% press releases! If this was email, SlashGeo would be the well meaning friend / relative that forwards "cute" junk mail. It's not nefarious, but it also adds little to the conversation.

The purpose of this post is not to simply rail on the SlashGeo "Team" (mentioned in this post), since that is not actually adding anything to the conversation.

Rather I have a suggestion as to how they can add value: If you are not adding content, then add value by acting as a filter. Here's a litte background on how some others are doing this in the .NET world...

In order to stay on top of what's going in in the larger .NET world, I read a lot of blogs (via RSS). I just recently culled my feed list down to 60, but many of these are now aggregate feeds - representing 10's or 100's of bloggers each. Anyhow, this represents a LOT of traffic - 100's of posts a day. As I noted above, I'm pretty busy, so finding time to read 150 posts a day is not easy.To make this easier, I have found some really good blogs which act as filters - separating the good stuff from the background "noise".

Perhaps the best example of this is Jason Haley's "Interesting Finds". Basically Jason subscribes to 1000+ feeds, and twice a day sifts through them to find the gems.

 

He even notes the "signal to noise ratio" - how many posts he reviewed vs the number that were "interesting".

When I do have time to read all the incoming feeds, I consistenly find that when I get to Jason's posting, the things he has picked out, are the postings I actually read. So - most days (or when I've got time) I'll start by checking what he's filtered out, and actually reading the posts, rather than spending that same time weeding through the same list of "noise"

Slash et al: You seem eager to add something to the community & "conversation", and this could add value. Parse out everything from PlanetGS/ESRI feeds/.NET feeds etc, and list only the interesting stuff. Of course, interesting is in the eye of the beholder, but it's a start. Maybe your team could specialize - ESRI Developer stuff, Open Source Stuff, End User Stuff, Data Stuff, Google Stuff.

Just an idea, because just sending quotes and links is not adding much to the conversation.