Say hello to the new guy

I announced back in February that yesterday I’d make the first change to the clique since I started it almost two months ago. I’m pleased to announce the new member is rgreco!

I actually discovered him via the very first comment on the Pick the Clique page so I think it’s appropriate that he’s also the first replacement. While rgreco has shared over 15,000 bookmarks, I’m interested in neither his sharing frequency nor volume; I’m more drawn to the breadth of topics covered, including dozens of bookmarks each for the tags sleep, curiosity, fear, and happiness.

And so what if his top tag is design? Isn’t everybody’s? I’m more interested in what I see in the long tail of his sharing.

Welcome, rgreco!

He and his lovely family also have a simple page offering a description of their work (it’s worth a look) and links to their flickr, tumblr, vimeo, and plush art gallery pages. If you’ll excuse me now, I’m off to wade through his 280 bookmarks tagged deschooling, whatever that means.

The focus

I think this experiment is going alright. I’ve settled on posting items singly, I’ve announced the first clique reshuffle, and I’ve streamlined the way posts are presented both on the site and in the RSS feed.

What might not be as obvious is the slight shift in focus. Instead of posting links that seem to have appealed to a large number of people already (based on the number of times they’ve been bookmarked in delicious), I’m focusing on bookmarks shared by only a handful. That doesn’t mean I won’t occasionally post something that’s been well-loved, just that I’ll do it less often.

I don’t want The Daily Clique to be about what people in the clique have read and shared that everybody else has; I want it to be about what people in the clique have read and shared that almost nobody has.

Put another way: if I’m going to tell a story about twenty-one strangers using nothing more than their shared bookmarks, I need to focus on what makes them different from the millions of other delicious-using strangers.

Single versus aggregated posting

(This is my second administrative post today. I’m clearly overthinking this.)

I wonder if I should continue aggregating my posts or if I should switch to single posts, clustered temporally. I chose aggregated posts at the beginning because I hate RSS inbox clutter and I didn’t want my readers to deal with it either. The downside to aggregated posts is that they reduce my ability to categorize and find posts.

How do I clearly title a post containing several items? Titling it with the date is not descriptive enough but if I get too descriptive, the title ends up being a short paragraph. Where’s the balance and how long do I want to work on achieving it? What do I tag aggregated posts? How do I organize the post internally?

Aggregation just doesn’t seem worth it if my only interest is to reduce RSS inbox clutter for myself and other people. Plus, it’s not like I’m posting 10 times a day.

I’ve decided to introduce a more flexible format: I’ll usually post items singly but aggregate them whenever it’s appropriate. I’ll also look at ways of offering the option of subscribing to a traditional RSS feed and one that aggregates the previous day’s posts.

Clique reshuffle

I devised the clique format in part to change my patterns of attention. It’s only been around for a couple of weeks but I can already tell that we’ll need to shuffle some members soon. Another part of me also wants to stick it out a little longer with the current group. As a compromise between these two impulses, I’ll replace one member of the clique but wait until March 15 to do it.

The purpose of The Daily Clique, part one

I began The Daily Clique a few days ago after spending a month thinking not just about the purpose of the blog but also about how to clarify that purpose for visitors, many of whom might never have heard of delicious.com. I also assumed that most of the visitors who have heard of delicious either don’t use it or use it sporadically. That’s okay: I’m not here to evangelize for a social bookmarking site; I’m here to share great links and sources.

But I’m also here to find delicious users who are unknown to me and share some of my interests. The 21 usernames in the list to the right constitute the current Clique. To qualify a user doesn’t necessarily need ten bookmarks per day going back to 2003; she just routinely needs to share interesting links that I would not ordinarily have found.

Sure, I prefer articles and websites somehow related to my chief interests—urbanism, transportation, planning, mapping and pragmatist philosophy—but I’m more concerned that the Clique provides me with a rich set of sources and online experiences.

I hold some members of the Clique as sacred and virtually above replacement (TomC, for example) but I’m very open to your suggestions of new delicious users to replace anybody in the current 21. The idea is that by making incremental changes to the makeup of the Clique, I’ll iterate towards a richer collection of links from which to cull the few that I share each day.