Rounding Up the Roundups

To help you along as you begin to develop your topical roundups . . .

Some "roundup" posts are simply a list of links. This Metafilter post, for example, is a roundup of mp3 blogs that share music.

But a roundup can be a much richer source of information. Take, for example, this post at BoingBoing.net (a popular blog). The post catalogs postings at BoingBoing about Sony's controversial music copyright-protection scheme. It offers readers a timeline of events and revelations, and it explains each link.

For a more intense example of an information-rich roundup, see this post about good news from Iraq, part of a series that was written by Arthur Chrenkoff and carried by the Wall Street Journal.

Roundups can cover absolutely anything. The personal productivity site Lifehacker, for example, does frequent "how to" round ups, like this one on digital photography, this one on ways to exploit a Google gmail account, this one on ways to search Google, and this one on sharing and downloading videos. (There's also this one that links to an article on how to use RSS feeds and then offers a roundup of RSS feeds for the Lifehacker site.)

Here's a simple roundup of links on the history of "@" sign (created by Ray Tomlinson, who is often called the father of email.) Here's one about kitchen gadgets. Here's one from Engadget (a popular gadget blog) with reviews of the iPod Nano.

This roundup post by a super sharp high school technology supervisor named Will Richardson offers a list of books and other resources for people trying to understand developing interactive technologies--like blogs, wikis, and RSS readers--on the web.

Glenn Reynolds, one of the most read political bloggers online, frequently points to roundups by others. Here's a link to roundups he's mentioned on his blog, Instapundit. Clicking around through some of these roundup posts should give you a sense of how useful a good roundup can be for helping you quickly learn quite a lot about the public debate around a complicated topic.

One great thing roundups can always offer: links out to the basic information as well as to very specific or complicated information. Notice, for example, what I did above with the link from "Sony's controversial music copyright-protection scheme": if you didn't know anything about this scheme, you could have linked out to that story and learned all the basic information you needed to know. While you don't want to make your links bump right up against each other (since links with no words or punctuation between them can be difficult to distinguish), any word in a roundup is potentially a link out to further information.

So, for example, if (like Adam) I was writing about the Mitsubishi 3000 GT, and I said something like, "Among other things, this car looks great," I would have the opportunity (as you can see) to link out to interesting information in several ways: to Adam's blog, to Mitsubishi autos, to photos from Google, to our class Blogroll. This kind linking is a fantastic way to take advantage of the internet as a rich source of information. It also should give you a sense of why the kind of tabbed browsing offered in Firefox and Safari is so great for research and learning purposes: you can be popping open all these side-links in tabs (with Apple-click on your Mac or Control-click on your PC) as you read through the original post. Then you can check out the tabs, or not, later. Linking like this is also good for your readers, who can decide how many links to follow and how much more information they really need. This way, you're giving a little information to those who already know most of what you're saying, but you're offering more in depth information, too, for those who know less about your topic.

Notice, also, that in my post (as in many of the posts I link to), there is context given for at least the major links. If, say, I'm just linking to Wikipedia from the word "Wikipedia," that's maybe enough context for that link, so long as I'm not doing a post about Wikipedia but just pointing to it as a resource. But for the main, major posts and articles to which you link, you should give more context. Possible questions you might have to answer: Who wrote it? Where was it published? Why is that author or publication authoritative? How enthusiastic are you about that author? What makes the post unique, informative, or otherwise worth your reader's time?

In your roundups, I'd like to see you linking not only to basic information but also to more in depth articles and to places for further reading. For example, Matt is writing about the Bay of Pigs Invasion, and he needs to send me not only to basic historical information on that event but also to books for further reading, and maybe to some of the more contentious takes and more recent news on the event. Dyani is writing about Johnny Cash, and she'll want to link not only to biographical information but also to, maybe, the official website, albums, obituary articles, and articles about the Joaquin Phoenix movie, and maybe to the official movie site.

Other things worthy of links: specific Google searches, Google News searches, Google Image searches, Flickr image searches or specific images, Technorati searches, books at Amazon.com.