The Quality of Our Connections

Let’s be honest. The Internet is pretty much all about selling stuff. It’s filled with native advertising and soulless endorsements. It’s hard to take any kind of product recommendation seriously from sites that make their money by selling us the next product. The churn of broken promises drives the machinery of the tech blogging world.

If you read carefully you’ll see the tell-tale signs. Reviews of dozens of pieces of hardware by one person written over the course of a week. There are the reviews that start with “I’ve used this for the past few days and I really like it.” I’m sure we are all familiar with the “this looks great” non-review. When everything is super, nothing is super.

But, there are some real stand-up people that just love to share enthusiasm. My short list includes the personality blogs like ShawnBlanc.net, BrettTerpstra.com, MacSparky.com or even MacStories.net. These are people that write with affection as if they were writing a letter home.1 These are aspirational contributions to the churn of digital marking.

I’m continually struggling with two aspects of writing on this site.

  1. I don’t like to write about things that are common
  2. I don’t like to endorse things I don’t actually use and like

Writing about the same headline everyone else is linking too is mostly boring and I know I hate seeing the same subject in my feed reader over and over. It’s not something I want to contribute to for the purpose of traffic and virtual shoulder pats.

Writing about things I don’t actually use and appreciate steals the joy from this little project I named “Macdrifter”. It makes it feel like cheap work.

Then there’s the flip side. I absolutely love promoting and talking about stuff I care about. I especially like sharing stuff I think is created by honest and considerate people. Let me pull back the curtain: There is almost nothing that David Sparks, Brett Terpstra, or Federico Vittici could make that I would not fall in love with. How can I not love things made by people that care about what they put out into the world?

This is a very long winded way of introducing some of today’s links. You’ve probably already heard about them.

  1. I’ll readily admit that many of these sites run ads or commingle opinions with paid endorsements. There’s nothing wrong with an honest person making an honest living. They’ve earned my trust by not doing it cheaply. ↩︎