Lifehacker - Feature

Our pals over at Lifehacker have a new section of Features where they’re posting longer how-tos and tutorials on all manner of cool stuff. Don’t miss How to set up a personal home web server, How to control your home computer from anywhere, and Professional E-mail Tips. These are all very well done and super-useful.

Permit me to extend two enthusiastic horns of rock toward the Lifehacker domain to celebrate this august move. The crew there is composed of some very smart cookies, and it’s really cool to see them spreading their wings and being encouraged to augment their link blogging with excellent original content. This is good.

Just because no one’s asked me yet, I’ll volunteer a stray factoid: the sites like 43F that I ever visit more than occasionally have some things in common: a) they have an original voice and a point of view, b) the authors make an effort to create and share new content and ideas—or at least present old ones in a new or contextual way.

I’m not against link blogs, mind you—done well and with excellent annotation, they can be a very enjoyable way to catch up on new-ish stuff. But when the echo starts exceeding the signal, things get much less interesting for me. Hint: if your last five days of blogging looks a lot like this, you need to start digging up some new leads.

I would really encourage people who are blogging on productivity, life hacks (or whatever else you call this stuff) to give a little more of themselves when they have something good to share. God knows I’m not inventing anything new here (“Hey, look! Buddhism!”—Merlin Mann, 9/2005), but I would love to see more tutorials, commentaries, and think-pieces that delve deeper than a link to the fastest way to put on your hat. There’s room for all of it, though, right? Right. Gotta love the Interweb.

You have the interest, time, and enthusiasm to blog, so keep that good stuff coming, gang. You know you have it in you.