We are prej­u­diced against mate­r­ial that doesn’t iden­tify itself as ‘New’ and this is a prob­lem not just with the major­ity of online infor­ma­tion con­sumers but also the web­sites that pan­der to this ‘old media’ bias.

Whether something’s “new” or “break­ing” is a con­cern for news­pa­per writ­ers seek­ing scoops. There’s no rea­son on Earth a web­site […] should feel any oblig­a­tion to flood its pages with con­stant new mate­r­ial. If what’s writ­ten in the site is writ­ten well, and time­less, the site should work like a book. The reader can click in, scan the vol­umes of text and read what he or she likes. The only rea­son web­site con­tent pro­duc­ers feel the need to crank out “New! New! New!” shit every day is because they’ve decided, for rea­sons beyond me, to com­pete with the 90% of blog­gers who do noth­ing but grab hot sto­ries, com­ment on them and link other com­ments about it from peo­ple in their net­work of friends. That’s not an audi­ence – that’s an echo chamber. […]

So what’s the cure? […] Approach the con­tent pro­duc­ing sites like books. When we find one we like, maybe stop, slow down, read the back cat­a­log. Take it as a col­lec­tion of essays, a run­ning mem­oir or the writ­ten equiv­a­lent of stand-up comedy. […]

Most of our lives are spent grap­pling with, fear­ing and resent­ing dead­lines. Why limit the mate­r­ial we read for plea­sure with arti­fi­cial ‘fresh­ness’ cri­te­ria? There are pages behind the face pages of web­sites, and all of the material’s free.

This is how I find the major­ity of the items that I share here; this arti­cle is almost a year old.

A com­pi­la­tion of the best things I posted in the site’s first year (and its sec­ond year, a com­pi­la­tion of which I’m cre­at­ing now) is full of arti­cles as rel­e­vant now as when they were ini­tially pub­lished. (Irony? Plug? Me?)