[ organized by this:
[edited] This should be separated into three entries: one about finding stuff you like online, one about making a site about things you like, and one about how to get a lot of content for your site.
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This is organized by arbitrary small groupings of asterisks.
This is mostly the text of yesterday rearranged into sections. I did all the work after midnight. Fuck all y’all.
Also, the sections have nothing to do with the opening quote.
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[Where and how to find stuff you like on the internet.]
Uhhh, thats a little vague, but it sounds like you are looking for an aggregator. Check metafilter.com, reddit.com, and news.ycombinator.com . Those are the three i check.
Which is to say, there isn’t anything that reviews other websites, most stuff like that is granual. Basically site users submit links and people comment about the links. Depending on the voting / moderation system, and barrier to entry. Metafilter is a little on the artsy fartsy side, but there is now a membership fee, so it tends to keep out obvious trolls and sockpuppet accounts (one user making multiple accounts to troll), news.ycombinator.com is hacker news, its users are generally serious, and the links revolve around technology and business. Reddit is a free-for-all, but most crap that ends up surfacing to digg and facebook links and whatnot show up there a few days earlier. They also have an interesting system of subsections, so you can only subscribe to the stuff you want.
Stay away from digg, its gotten pretty bad.
Some suggestions:
http://deathwishindustries.com/?op=home/What%20Is%20Best
http://alltop.com/
Try google reader and just putting in the RSS feeds of the sites you already like.
For finding new sites, it really depends on what you like. _You_ have a better idea of what you are looking for and how to find it then a generic “reviews” site.
If you want to see good content surfaced, you are going to end up with an aggregator (like metafilter), or you are going to have to sort through your own rss collections.
Maybe check the webby’s or something.
In all honesty, reddit is as close as you will get to something like this. For example, this is sports:
http://www.reddit.com/r/sports
gaming:
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming
and cute animal pictures:
http://www.reddit.com/r/aww
There is another one where a guy is just posting his C language tutorial, and one for people who make music, and politics and all the usual crap thats on the internet. There are other sites, too, but it really depends on what you are interested in.
The landing page is just a big mix of whatever is popular, but you can make an account and only follow the ones you want. If you find a particularly good link, you should dig around the site that it is hosted on.
If you are just looking for more stuff to read, i would follow one of the aggregators, and when you find something you really like, just dig around their site a while. If you like it, add the rss feed to reader.
If you just want the link to good posts on a specific subject from one person with your tastes, thats just a blog. If you want it “crowd sourced”, you are dealing with reddit et al, which is fine because those communities spawn a kind of group think. There is no reason to go to the comments.
If you want a site that covers links with the kind of “this is good” facism, it will be limited to being particularly skewed toward one subject.
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[Organizing content on the internet]
Anyway, the internet doesn’t really work in the way you described. You can check epionions, or ask.metafilter.com. Ranking something as “best” is completely subjective. Craigslist is the “best” place to find ads because its got the most, but it really sucks in a lot of ways, certainly isn’t the “best” in terms of navigating or actually surfacing what you want, and there is no guarantee that what you find isn’t a scam. There certainly isn’t something that would specialize in what you are looking for.
Anything that you find that is that broad is usually just an SEO company with shallow (and possibly wrong) articles that is kept running solely on ad money, which is how most sites are run. You would have a hard time getting an objective opinion.
Here’s the thing: there is too much freaking content on the web. Reviews sites live off of advertising revenue. Website popularity and search ranking is determined by who links to you and how. These sites live and die by how they are ranked in google (and the effort goes in to search engine optimization (SEO)). There are literally millions of blogs out there. How would you go about categorizing and ranking them as “good” when it comes to it. How would you categorize an app like twitter? What makes it good? The only use that comes from sites like that is how much time you are willing to put in to it. Twitter hits a sweet spot for narcissists and really lonely people who want to feel important, but whats the rating?
Additionally, most blogs and modern sites are addicted to pumping out content, the quality of which is variable. I find the occasional somethingawful article to be funny, but i usually find it from an aggregator. SA would certainly be near the top of a “juvenile humor” category, but the stuff you want are individual links.
The fact that most sites now are highly dynamic and deal with constantly updated content makes rating the overall site something pretty nebulous.
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[The difficulty of making an overall high quality website portal]
There will not be a mega website collection site because that has been proven, time and again, to not work. See: google vs ask/yahoo/altavista/lycos/etc. Yahoo had the option to buy googles algorithm back when it was called “backrub” and turned it down because they were convinced that the future of the web would be “portal” sites that were just paid directory listings to other sites.
They were very very wrong. A “web site” is not a unit of measurement in the internet, it is about pages and links to those pages. There is no metric for the quality of a “web site” that is a function of its content, so there is no way of organizing this.
Additionally, by making rankings you are lumping very different things into one generic term that is inappropriate for it. The onion is a content based site with a distribution schedule based on print media, gawker is a content based site with a 24-hour publishing cycle. Gmail and craigslist are web applications, which are programs you use, where the quality is based on the data you and other people put into it. These both technically fall under the monicker but are all completely different.
Sites on the internet do not have a physical analogue. A website is not a “virtual magazine”, and a web-app is not like a “virtual restaurant”. Community based sites tend to keep the community there, who already there, additionally the community, and layout and content of sites can change very drastically, with a dynamic site that is constantly being updated, a given review would only be good for a snapshot.
And the last reason it wouldn’t work is that crowd sourced reviews on the internet are almost completely worthless.
Sorry to keep harping on this, but this requirement (along with the no-paid submissions, and covering a wide variety of topics) is the crux of the problem of what you are asking for.
This is a really excellent discussion of this phenomena: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk-at-etech/
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[The Nitty Gritty]
It sounds like you want a site that is reviews based on high quality content.
If you want to make a site like this, you can focus on original content or community content, or make a hybrid.
Impartiality:
*Anything that needs a staff will be biased by needing revenue, which is typically from advertising.
Editorial (original content):
PRO: You control all the content.
CON: Limited by writing and editorial staff. Expensive to produce.
* I can deploy a few different Content Management Systems (CMS), these are basically stand-alone apps that you can add sections and articles to. The more complex ones you can do most any type of content creation, but they are heavy-weight and hard to use, and much, much harder to modify. However, there is almost definitely an option that can give you most of the features you need, for free, out of the box.
* Editorial is labor heavy, and its continually labor heavy. You have 2 choices:
1) Do it yourself:
This is really hard. If you are considering something like this, i would definitely just start a wordpress blog/pagemanager and start organizing it into a bigger site when you have enough content.
2) Take on a staff:
a) The upside is that the labor is cheap (you can outsource short informational or review articles about anything for less than $8/hour, possibly including proofreading, with a rejection option).
b) The downside is that the result is also cheap (they dont care about what they are writing about, just hammering out a word limit for a crappy paycheck, just like any other staff writer).
c) The other downside is that it will never reduce, content output is sub-linear but predictable, to cover twice as much as you currently cover you need at least twice as many people, with the overhead of management and dealing with placing that much more content.
d) It introduces a non-reducible, linearly increasing cost, which may or may not be worth the time/money trade-off depending on your situation.
UGC (community content):
PRO: Free Content.
CON: Content typically crappy, expensive to maintain.
* UGC, honestly, sucks. It is the penny stocks of entertainment. There is no [by scale] money in it, and it generates low quality content, the lower the bar to entry the more gamed and idiotic the users interaction with the site will be. However, with the low barrier to entry, you can increase engagement. That is the success of facebook, its very easy to sign up, and all you do is constantly interact with little time wasters, but most of it is not very good. Ditto comments, and reviews, and tweets.
* Similarly, there are software packages you can install that can give you pretty good UGC options, again depending on how it should work. For example, you can install the exact same software running wikipedia, slashdot and reddit, and install high quality clones of metafilter, or stackoverflow.
* A pure UGC site can take the load off of the editorial burden, but you need at least 2 things:
1) Users. Aka “Customers” (really just sheep for advertisers, if you’re going that route). They are always right. You need to make sure that you are providing them what they want so more of them will come. There is a good chance you have no idea what that is, but its probably not exactly what you have in your head right now. You can also try buying them through Search Engine Marketing (SEM), but that can be very expensive.
2) Moderation. With enough users you can get people dedicated enough to do it for you, but you need a fair amount of users and need to have invested enough time taking a part your community to find someone you trust. Or you could also hire someone or outsource it, but you won’t be able to have much faith in them sharing your vision.
* For customization you will need some work from engineers and designers. These people suck, and take a lot of time and money to make things right. You can always get cheaper, but its like buying a $200 car off craigslist, or an $8 website review off of e-lance. It will require a lot more maintenance and will be of lower quality. Of course the expensive people can also suck (like Keith Haring).
Making either of these types from scratch is labor intensive. A person or two could do a very basic one from scratch, but it would be lacking in features. This is not always a bad thing: googles home page is very very simple. However, getting full time engineering / design work to keep making it better will most likely result in you not being particularly different from putting some elbow grease into a prepackaged system, and could end up being more time consuming and expensive than just putting a bid on eLance, or mechanical turk or (maybe odesk?) or some other internet outsourcing job.
Essentially, you want a high-quality content-based site that features sites with high quality content. Ideally your site would be good enough to do a feature on itself. The barrier to creating that (or at least getting started) is very very low. The content however, is the stickler.
You can do it, or you can get people to do it for you. I’ve outlined most of the options above.
In the simplest case, I can set up a basic wordpress or CMS site and you can just start working on it (like, in less than an hour). I’ve done this for a bunch of other sheikz as well.
If you want to go the more advanced routes, thats possible too.
My Suggestion: Start small.
[like i said, typorrhea]