Alex Payne:
The problem with abdicating your content consumption to other people, though, is other people. Perhaps it’s overestimating my ability to find interesting things to read, but I don’t trust my friends and the Internet at large to educate and entertain me. In the venn diagram of my interests and my friends’, there may be 80% overlap, but most of the content that I’m going to find deeply engaging is probably in the leftover 20% at the margins.
Also, Alex points out how Fever really only works if you subscribe to a lot of tech-related weblogs, as these are the ones that more commonly post links leading away from their site. Since I don’t read very many non-tech weblogs, Fever works great for me.
Between Twitter, Fever’s Hot List, and the small handful of my daily “must-reads”, I feel quite confident that I’m not missing the 20% of the most engaging content on the web. Also, I make sure to do my part and post a link when I do come across that 20%.
Like Merlin Mann said, “If linkbloggers wrote more, shovelbloggers thought more, and a-listers cited more, the web would get 15% more interesting overnight.”