Friday, March 2nd, 2007, 5:10 am
Submitting to Netscape at a High Pace
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OME time ago I was asked about my working habits in Netscape.com. My reply no appears in a friend’s blog. As I wrote my response in a rush, I have since then decided to tidy up the text a little bit. The slightly expanded explanation lies below.
In a nutshell, by concentrating on one topic at Netscape I know much better what was already submitted and I also know which bits in articles can connect, what gets repeated, and what’s considered major news. I used to be more diverse and I sometimes tried to break the news, but it was harder to keep track of. A lot of items were virtually ‘blocked’ because of duplicates, which I always try to avoid. I chose to be working on Open Source and Linux, for which I have real passion. This increases morale and motivation throughout work. It is merely a case of being amused while compensated, owing to formal role (and accompanying duties) of a Navigator.
I work in ‘batch made’, so over the course of the day I accumulate a list containing a title, a short description and a link. I assemble these in a simple text file. Because I don’t submit stuff immediately, however, it’s unlikely that I will be able to get the major news in. Duplicates are just out of the question. 2 or 3 times a day I just open many submit-type pages, allocating them to separate browser tabs, and then do the data entry from the text file I prepared. One monitor contains the Web browser and another contains the text file. As I scroll down the list I also separate some item which I wish to E-mail for use at Groklaw.
As for articles that I collect, I go through many hundreds of titles in the RSS feeds and follow about half the links. I try to extract the text that’s most eye-catching out of articles/blog items. Choice of RSS feeds is important because some tend to repeat the news (Slashdot, CNN, BBC), serving as slow and careful-to-corrobate-with-sources middlemen, whereas sites like Digg and C|Net have a lot of early scoops.
