When is something "worth" posting?

April 29, 2001 2:26 PM

I am wary of posting things from the new york times. I guess since many of the things in the times are discussion-worthy, it has to have some personal significance or other spin to be worth a link. also, it needs to be from the last week, even if it hasn't been posted before. that's my impression right now. any comments?

also what about posting this ted rall cartoon? it isn't the type of thing that would garner dozens of comments, i don't think. so i guess i can think about it logically and decide whether it's worth posting. at the same time, i would like to spark talk about ted rall's stuff. my personal website isn't really set up for that sort of thing and doesn't get enough visitors to get an actual discussion going. so what do i do?
posted by benjamin to etiquette/policy at 2:26 PM (4 comments total)

Benjamin, probably the only way to get what you're looking for is to develop your personal site, and perhaps incorporate something like BlogVoices into it to enable discussion.

And yeah, you probably won't have that many people contributing to a discussion at first, but keep putting up, or linking to, good content and after a while you'll get an audience to discuss the ocassional odd cartoon or article that you discover.

Good luck to ya.
posted by anildash at 2:52 PM on April 29, 2001

Well, I think this kind of linking (taking the Ted Rall cartoon as an example) has a place here. The value of a thread like this wouldn't be the link--Rall's been around for a long time and has probably been linked here before several times--it's the discussion it would provoke.

You could do some research and find a good source of info on the kind of thing Rall is suggesting, and then use Rall's cartoon as a kind of satirical gloss to set the tone. Or you could lay out some ideas about political comics or the contribution of comics to political debate, or something, and use the Rall cartoon to seed the discussion. Either way, instead of a trivial "here's a Ted Rall cartoon," you'd be doing a "here's what I think is interesting about this Ted Rall cartoon," and I think that leads to better discussion.

Whenever you post a link, there's always the lurking question: so what? If a link is posted as just a "here's a link" kind of link, then it should be inherently interesting. But any link can be *made* interesting if the poster is willing to do a little work interpreting it and shaping an intelligent initial response. When people complain about NYT or Salon links, I think they're really complaining about laziness on the part of the poster.
posted by rodii at 5:03 PM on April 29, 2001

thanks for the replies.

rodii, i totally agree with you. it's all about using rall's (or whoever's) underlying concept as well as other takes on the same subject matter in order to get the discussion going.
posted by benjamin at 9:21 PM on April 29, 2001

As to the NYTimes issue, I'm ready to stop mentioning the free registration or the mirror site. I think about everyone on MeFi either subscribes or can figure it out.
posted by darren at 10:36 AM on May 10, 2001