News feeds still better than Twitter

Twitter may be great for picking up stories that fly under the radar of mainstream news stories and trusted blogs. People, such as tech writers, who need to obtain news a little earlier may also need to follow Twitter. However for real news reading I find it a better use of time to go to primary news sources or news feeds. Lately on Twitter I’ve been turning up stories that, far from being cutting-edge, are just old news, no longer relevant. Other stories sometimes turn out to be baseless rumor. To filter through all the chaff takes time – the more populous the stream, the longer it takes. It’s both a lazy and a tedious way to follow news. Every click takes time.

No doubt building up a large number of relatively trusted streams, then reading them through filtering mechanisms like Twitter Times, can be effective. But it’s easier to accomplish a useful news stream using Feedly, for example.

It would be good if Google (or Feedly) could weight stories in one’s news stream by checking all interactions with a given story, by shares, retweets, Url shortening, Diggs, etc., and also emphasize links with activity from friends across social networks. No doubt that will come, just as Google is trying out a similar feature for general search results. But even without it I think that RSS streams are the way to go, and an easier choice for obtaining a good balance of news than attempting to obtain the same from social networking services like Twitter.

Wars of words

It was fascinating to go back today to read up on Gilad Atzmon, whom I quoted in yesterday’s post for his review of Avatar, while knowing very little about the man. A former Israeli, now British anti-Israeli, highly political jazz musician, who has invoked the ire of other Jewish anti-Zionists. His opinions are hotly debated behind the scenes in Wikipedia, and currently at Jews sans Frontieres. Arriving into this hornets’ nest and trying to understand why these radical left Jewish thinkers were against this other radical left Jewish thinker, calling him a liar, a racist and a buffoon was challenging until it became clear that they see him as blurring the lines between Zionism and Jewish ethnicity and throwing both in the same bag. At least, I think I’ve got it right. Not trying to patronize anyone – I can see there are real issues here. Just not my issues.

Sky people go home!

Went to see Avatar and sat in the front row, which made the experience even more hallucinogenic. To an audience who thinks it has seen everything, Hollywood continues to say, “You ain’t seen nothing yet”. And that’s true. Avatar is aesthetically amazing.

It’s also brilliantly subversive, as Gilad Atzmon points out in Counterpunch: “A Humanist Call From Mt. Hollywood “. Unlike, “The Lord of the Rings” films, to which it can be compared in terms of spectacle, but which some saw as a metaphor for America’s war on the “Axis of Evil”, there are no questionable messages here. The movie is against war, colonialism, cultural intervention and exploitation. Instead it defends the values of indigenous peoples and legitimizes their resistance. It promotes a worldview based on holism and interconnectedness of all life. Instead of the rapacious aliens that have appeared in so many science fiction films, humans are the aliens, coming to plunder and destroy, under the cover of a phony do-goodism.

At the end of the movie we stir from our seats, remove the 3D glasses that have transported us to this fantasy world, and exit the theater to the realities of life on earth – in my case to the city of Modiin that shoulders its way into the West Bank and whose mayor wants its Road 443 artery to Jerusalem to remain closed off to Palestinians.