I’m one of those obnoxious facebook friends who tends to
look things up before I repost, and when I discover something is incorrect, or
only partially correct, I don’t hesitate to post additional information in a
comment. I’d say about 70% of my friends
are glad to learn more. The rest, well….have
you ever heard of “don’t confuse me with the facts”? It’s really more like “don’t annoy me with the
facts”.
I find facts to be very handy things. They are, however, tough to find on the
internet sometimes. The web is the
ultimate democracy – anyone can post anything. There is
no Fact Police. There can be plenty of
pushback for a post, but there’s no guarantee the pushback has anything to do
with actual facts.
I tend to stay away from most news sites, especially the
ones connected to television stations. The
ones with obvious political biases – BOTH left and right – are, to me, pretty
transparently off base. The only
newspaper I read regularly is The Economist. If you usually get your news from a US source of
any kind, I encourage you to give it a try. It’s very enlightening to read about us from a
point of view outside the country. And I
also like learning about other parts of the world. One of the things I really hate about American
media is the apparent assumption that if it didn’t happen in the US or directly affect
Americans, it isn’t really important. The
other source I trust for news is NPR. Folks on the far right seem to think it’s
very left leaning, but I find it pretty balanced, and it often has the detail I
crave on a topic that interests me.
For many other things, I might read them but unless an
article feels solid and I can corroborate it with other sources, I usually won’t
repost it. Snopes.com
and Politifact.com are
good friends. I love that Politifact
pulls no punches: you’ll find “pants-on-fire” labels on untrue statements no
matter who made them.
As a geek, I do my best to keep up with what’s happening in
IT. It’s tough. There are so many subspecialties that no one
person can possibly stay current on everything.
Fortunately, there are lots of good blogs and news sites. Here are some of my favorites:
- Sophos’ NakedSecurity keeps me up to date on what to watch and I find them mostly written in English rather than tech-ese. I repost their articles a lot.
- InfoWorld has several interesting blogs, especially Tech Watch
- TechRepublic’s multi-topic site
- Gizmo’s reviews of freeware, known as techsupportalert.com
- Wall Street Journal’s CIO Report
- My friend John Ahlberg’s blog at Waident.com, which also tends to cover many IT-related topics.
Then there are the sites for cycling, for knitting, for
gardening, for fun, and for inspiration.
Just having that list might make you think I couldn’t keep up with them
ALL, all the time. And you’d be
right. Still, I imagine there are good
ones out there that I don’t know anything about. What are some of your favorite sources?
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