Ask YC: Cliff Notes For Blogs | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Cliff Notes For Blogs

Thinking of starting a blog, which has a simple goal: Cliff Notes For Blogs (or a blog for the ADD). Two simple updates a day that condenses all the information you would need on the most important topics into short 2-3 sentence summaries.

Found the need to do this after a) I wanted to get back into blogging b) I needed a service that would let me not have to spend hours a day reading blogs.

Targeted towards two types of readers:

a) Those with information overload and could use a good summary of everything, so time frees up.

b) Those who want to be up to date and in the know, but dont have time or the know how to read all the important tech blogs.

Thoughts? Anything I can clarify?

This is not a company, but literally a blog itself. Also planning on linking back to one good analysis on each topic and one good long post (ie techcrunch, webware,etc.)

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I subscribe to a magazine called The Week that operates on this premise. It's a weekly that summarizes top stories (general news, editorials, columns, business, tech, reviews of art, music, books, films, theater, etc.) by drawing a few key sentences and quotes from multiple mainstream sources.

They have a daily online version here: http://www.theweekdaily.com/

None of the stories are generally more than 4 paragraphs or about 12-15 sentences and usually draw on 3-4 sources with varying takes on an issue.

what drove you to subscribe? simplicitiy i assume?

do you think something less than 4 paragraphs, more like 4-5 sentences would work?

In the world of Twitter ... even 4-5 characters could work. ;)

I actually subscribed because I had expiring airline miles that I had to use up on something and it was one of the options. That said, I'm planning to renew. I've found that I am so overloaded with information on a daily basis that the shorter summaries are a lot easier to keep up with -- and because the summaries quote their sources anything that I want to delve into deeper I already have a short list of good articles to check out.

(Side note: I'm a tech blogger, so I spend my week immersed in tech news and The Week magazine allows me to catch up on all the other news I may have missed, which is nice.)

haha, please don't encourage a twitter competitor with a 4-5 character limit. :-o

Yup, the goal is to make the consumption of tech news simpler. Definite links back to other valuable sources + analysis for those who want to dig in deeper. Not sure if you saw it earlier in the thread, but this site Brijit is similar to TheWeek. Sadly, they just closed shop.

Wait... you mean there's "other news" out there besides tech?

Ah yes, I remember Brijit. Even longer ago, in the late 90s/early 00s there was a site called BriefMe that did email newsletters based around the same concept. Similarly, it also closed up shop -- possibly for the same reason (it was paying people $5 per short summary and I guess couldn't break even on the other end).

I suppose it depends entirely on the execution but for me, sites like Hacker News, Techmeme, Digg, Reddit, et al have this space pretty well covered.

The core problem I see arising: If you're doing this manually (and solo) and you don't want to "have to spend hours a day reading blogs," the odds of coming up with good content from varying sources is a bit unlikely, no?

Hacker news + Digg sum up what you "should" be reading, but you still have to read a ton to get all of it taken care of. Techmeme, sums up what you should read and the 20 articles like it. Think of cuili. Big takeaways were:

- Former google employees - Bigger index by x amount - 33 mil in venture funding. - Search results arent that accurate for reasons xyz

If you're good at summarizing stuff, I'm running a little contest on Squeezed Books:-)

Very interesting site. Reminds me of the book summary clubs id see on flights.

Reminds me of Brijit, which provided 100-word summaries of articles in major newspapers and magazines. Unfortunately, it ran out of money, because its business model involved paying people to write the summaries.

ive eventually thought about opening it to user submissions. The incentive is a link back to their site + name credit.

better yet, do it via trackback or whatever variant is hip those days

trackback to submit?

yes

One way to make this more successful is to make sure high school students are forced to read the blogs you're covering, which is why Cliffs Notes and SparkNotes are successful.

hey, that's a very very good point worth mentioning.

interesting idea. i think it would work just fine outside the tech industry, though.

id start it inside the tech industry to start. this is just a blog, no huge plans for it. Just something i see a need for and would enjoy writing.

Yes, exactly my thought. In tech industry, I'd say the problem you are aiming at is solved reasonably well already - Techmeme, HN, Friendfeed, or even slashdot...I just skimm what is new and that is it.

But I don't want to discourage you - it could work, if you will find your own angle, have good editing skills and willing to do it regularly.

Techmeme,etc. all sum up what you should be reading, not what it is. Techmeme/HN tells you where to find the news easily, not what the news is easily.

Can you give some example, then?

You visit the site, there are two updates per day posted. Each update has the most important headlines of the past 12 hours. Example summary or story:

Scrabulous Gets Shut Down on Facebook

-North America ONLY , not international -Decision made by Scrabulous devs, NOT FACEBOOK -Culmination of Hasbro suit filed last week on DMCA grounds -EA has US rights + real networks with international rights

Is the goal to represent news in the twitter format?

no, not at all. closest thing to twitter might be the brevity and simplicity. it will be longer than 140 chars tho.

It could be a Greasemonkey script which would attach available summaries to links on HN, reddit. Summaries could be picked up from your blog or from comments with special tag "Summary:

EDIT: I mean m/^Summary:\n\n/m

I like it actually. Had thought about that later on in terms of scale.

<pedantic>It's CliffsNotes</pedantic>

/ducks

I do fancy the idea, though.

haha, really? i didnt know that. My apologies to Cliff.

Thanks :)

We shall call it "Mazy".

or get really, really good at skim reading.

Sure that works to some degree, but it still takes a ton more time and organization.

Think of this as a blog reading hack.

Kind of like whatthefuckdoineedtoknow.com?

haha, funny read.

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