It's like the link round-up, as a form, is beginning to reinvent the front page, even if nobody notices that. I just scanned Pravda and Izvestia, and there was literally nothing I wanted to post on. The pages were too complicated, and all the stories were obviously crap anyhow. And the editorials and Op-Eds were worse. Ditto Google news, where those whizzy new Web 2.0 filters fill up the page with useless controls, and make me conscious of what could be missing, rather than what's there. (Plus Google's page-rank algorithm for news floated the "travel advisory to Europe" mid-terms gaslighting story to the top, which means that it's been totally gamed by The Powers That Be. FAIL). Yahoo News is actually better organized than Google, but it's structured by source, not topic, making its function as a mere aggregator nakedly evident.

So, I went over to Yves place, and every link there was interesting, I read two of them (building traffic for them, of course), and left a comment. Now, one of the links was to Izvestia, but since Izvestia gets in the way of its own content, I didn't find them there.

Yves is not an aggregator, but a curator*, so there's obviously space (even a market, of a sort) for that. The Confluence runs a fine long-form round-up, and Mark Thoma runs a meta-link round-up that includes links to other link round-ups. (C&L also runs a well-known blog roundup, but it's not really focused on news.)

Now, I've never done link round-ups, because I'm an old school Eschatonian, even if I can't buy a link from the guy any more: Five links, five posts! But maybe I should try to master this new form. Interesting editorial challenge!

NOTE * The Sideshow has been a superb curator for years; everybody should bookmark it. Avedon focuses especially on the smaller blogs where, as we know, the writing is so much better than on the A list.