you are who you listen to

i can't construct a coherent paragraph anymore. this is partially due to all my micro-internetting in the past few months, but it's also because i'm bored with how people "develop" a point in political essay writing, and how an essay of 700 words will only have one paragraph that is good. if that much. just get to the part that i don't know about already...

today i programmed an RSS feed. the concept itself is kind of confusing (why can't i have key words within news websites i want - ex: der spiegel and energy politics? i dont want to subscribe to all of spiegel's articles and i dont want to get all articles on energy politics) and i also programmed it to be in german, which means that i'm kind of fumbling through the whole thing. it also makes weird assumptions, like that i would want to subscribe to news about munich. well, at least i learned what the most internet saturated city in germany is. or at least, the most self-absorbed internet saturated city.

chris brogan made the point in his blog a while ago that in our 'information age' that we're defined not so much as what we say, but by whom we're listening to. i think this is true -gawker, the snarky manhattan-based culture blog, for instance, always says where they got a news bulletin from, along with the original source (example here). ben smith, an influential washington-based blogger, also does this. I think it's pretty cool, because these authors could just attribute the original source, but instead choose to share both. essentially, there's no shame in crediting another blog as a(nother) good information stream. newspapers do the same thing, but unlike newspapers, blogs are rated by the number of hits - so really a blogger has nothing to gain by linking to *his/her own* stream of information, but it is often done. I love how the internet is conducive to approaching collaboration as competitiveness.

to whom you listen is also a way of socially networking, as i found out yesterday. a former classmate of mine who was ranked one of the top 50 most influential female bloggers looked up my blog and started talking about how we read the same blogs - and isn't that cool that we have something in common? i really just put the list up there for my own convenience (before i installed me RSS READER onto my computer), but i guess my own little patch of the internet is an advertisement for me in a way i hadn't thought of before.