What’s all this, then?

The short version

You read a lot of news, right? What is one thing you have read about today that is worth sharing with friends? Got it? Okay, good. This is the place to share it. Here are the rules:

You can only post one article per day.
The article you post should present a current event, an idea, or something else informative. It should not be an opinion piece.

That’s basically it. If that sounds interesting, read on for the long version. Or, get started now.

The long version

If you’re like me, you read a lot of stuff on the Web. At least some of it is worth sharing with friends, and that’s easy to do. A few clicks and boom: you’ve mailed the link to a half dozen of your friends.

The thing is, it isn’t always that simple. Figuring out what’s worth sharing takes time, energy, and judgement. So does figuring out whom to send a particular story to. And we’ve all got that one friend who doesn’t exercise judgement and fills our “in” boxes with half a dozen links every day.

With so much to choose from, we spend a lot of energy filtering every page that floats past our eyeballs. Either that or we get swallowed up in hours of aimless browsing, e-mailing links back and forth and feeding each other’s addictions. It’s all too much.

So, let’s keep it short and simple. What one thing have you read today that you want to share? Got it? Okay, good. This is the place to share it.

How this works

Here are the basics:

You can only post one article per day.
The article you post should present a current event, an idea, or something else informative. It should not be an opinion piece. The point is to inform, not persuade.
New articles don’t become visible until the end of the day. All posted articles become visible at the same time. There’s little point in checking the site more than once a day, and there is nothing to gain by being the first to post.

Every day, the site will pick one user’s story to go front and center on the home page. You can read other users’ submissions for the past couple days, too. The choice of top story means nothing; everyone gets a turn, but you won’t know when your turn is until it happens.

You can click on a user to see everything she’s ever posted, but you probably shouldn’t. In fact, I might make it so you can’t. The point is to see what your friends are reading about lately, not to spawn browser windows for hours on end.

What this is not

This is not the place to post funny videos or “top ten” lists. There are plenty of places to do that already.

You cannot vote articles up or down. There is no score.

This is not the place to push your politics. Yes, I know, your leftist friends need a reality check about taxes’ impact on business activity. And yes, your rightist (is that a word?) friends need to face up to the humanitarian consequences of recent military adventures. And yes, everyone should worry about the shrinking political center, and so on, and so on. However, a serious debate of ideas and values cannot happen merely by trading hyperlinks, so we are not going try here. Post provocative stories from biased sources, by all means, but please make them stories that inform, not persuade.

Wrap