I feel your pain Tom,

Today I followed a link on twitter to something that i had seen before ~ a blog post that contains, not a lot more than, a second hand picture (attributed at least), retweeted from popbitch that is also no doubt available in their mailout.

almost impossible not to click though – even if you are 90% sure that it is that thing doing the rounds…

it was this if anyone is interested:
http://anotherdamnblog.com/index.php/today-was-a-good-day-flow-chart/

Unlike you, I find this practice to be one of the most useful things on Twitter. Let me explain why…

When I fire up my feed reader, more often than not I see 1000+ unread articles waiting for me. It’s a heartsink and a chore that I put off, which only makes it worse when I finally do. In despair I frequently “mark all as read” and undoubtedly miss out on some interesting stuff. But even if I do spend the time looking through the ratio of interesting/irrelevant is poor. I guestimate that I read, at best, 1 in 50 posts.

When people post links on Twitter, however, the ratio is very different – maybe 1 in 15 links is interesting. This is because links posted on Twitter have been prefiltered by people I trust (if I didn’t trust them I wouldn’t follow them) so it’s inevitable that they will be the best of the best articles / videos / jokes /news that are circulating.

And when a link is so good that it gets retweeted, that really is a sign of something worthwhile. The online equivalent of a double-distilled whisky (does that analogy work at all..?)

OK, so some jokes get tired, but isn’t that just life? And at least on Twitter you have the ultimate control. It’s called unfollow.