YouTube claims that one hour of video is uploaded to their website every second. Apple's fiscal reports show that they sell about 262 iPhones every hour—a figure greater than the world's birth rate. According to Wired, the NSA is building an internet surveillance center capable of storing over one yottabyte of information, which equals about 500 quintillion pages of text.
As the world's internet-using population increases, so does the amount of information on the web. This effect is creating an unimaginable wealth of data and content, inevitably producing a staggering amount of clutter to sort through. Fortunately, a number of sites exist solely for the purpose of providing pertinent, interesting, and relevant information and content. A stunning example is a blog called the New Shelton Wet/Dry.
As the world's internet-using population increases, so does the amount of information on the web. This effect is creating an unimaginable wealth of data and content, inevitably producing a staggering amount of clutter to sort through. Fortunately, a number of sites exist solely for the purpose of providing pertinent, interesting, and relevant information and content. A stunning example is a blog called the New Shelton Wet/Dry.
Even for a blog, the New Shelton's design is minimal. Its main page is a simple white; the left column contains just a small logo ("the New Shelton wet/dry: What matter who's speaking?) and a "Browse Archives" menu. A large middle column displays the site's content: Blurbs, usually a few paragraphs, from articles and studies compiled regularly from newspapers, medical journals, technology websites, and other sources. Each blurb is accompanied by a loosely-related title and image, making every post a sort of collage.
There doesn't seem to be an underlying theme, except that each blurb is freshly intriguing. Here's an example from the current front page: a blurb titled "You'll find me a different character down there" taken from an article in the Wall Street Journal. The four small paragraphs, snipped from different places in the article, summarize the research of scientists at Stanford who are observing the Proteus effect: "behavioral alterations in the real world that are triggered by changes in how our bodies appear to us in a virtual world." Accompanying the blurb is a photo of two men riding on horseback into a sunset. Clicking on the picture reveals that it's a still from a 1971 Western film Zachariah. At the bottom of the blurb is the most crucial element, a link to the original article. This is where the New Shelton shines.
By summarizing the most interesting aspects of the article in a small blurb and then linking back to the full article, the blog gives the reader full control. A blurb is short and sweet, which is what most of us are looking for, especially when we aren't particularly interested in the subject at hand. But in the cases when we do want to know more, the New Shelton makes it easy for us to explore further. It's much easier to find out what we want to dedicate our reading time to by skimming a few blurbs in a blog instead of visiting each source and filtering through all of its content.
A blog that doesn't affiliate itself with a certain theme or cause is also bound to be much more diverse than a particular journal or publication. Some of the New Shelton's current front page posts include "5 Ways Google Earns Money Off You", "Traffic Cop Issues Ticket to Moving Bus" and an article from the Daily Mail about Earth's quietest place.
It's fortunate that there is a semblance of organization for the hundreds of posts on the New Shelton. Each blurb is tagged with one or more identifying words, and clicking on the "Browse Archives" menu reveals the immense list of categories, from advertising (with 65 blurbs) to zoophilia (with three.)
The cream of the crop, though, is its roughly bi-weekly mega-post, always with the title "Every day, the same, again". These posts are packed with 25+ ultra-short blurbs, each also serving as a link to the source. Blurbs in these posts are usually even stranger and more intriguing, but no less scientific than normal posts. The latest "Every day" includes links with such titles as "How Wealth Reduces Compassion", "Excessive worrying may have co-evolved with intelligence", and "Japanese ATMs to use palm readers in place of cash cards".
Blogs like the New Shelton are making it possible for readers to learn—whether it be a lot about a little, or a little about a lot—without the trouble and time required to sift through irrelevant information. In an age where there is literally too much information to experience in one's lifetime, this is essential—because we just can't filter through an hour of YouTube every second.
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