Collections of in-depth articles

[Mike L]

Came across a couple of interesting sites over the weekend, which I thought I'd share. Apologies if these are already well known.

The first is Longform (www.longform.org). It's essentially a hand-picked selection of topical, in-depth articles, culled from a variety of sources.

Too much of what we read on websites seems to be aimed at people with short attention spans - people who want information in small chunks, and who can't cope with more than a few paragraphs at a time.

Longform, on the other hand, focuses on good writing that treats its subjects in depth. The editors select one or two longer articles per day that they feel deserve careful reading. They encourage you to use Instapaper to flag them for reading at your leisure. Of course, there's also the possibility of transferring them to a portable reading device.

Perusing the current offerings, I can only see a couple of articles that interest me. But that's the whole point: quality rather than quantity. My only real criticism is that the articles are almost exclusively from US sources, with only an occasional offering from the rest of the world.

The other site I came across is similar to Longform. It's called Give Me Something To Read (http://givemesomethingtoread.com). But instead of the editors making their own selection, the articles are those that are most frequently flagged on Instapaper. There's no guarantee of quality - except the assumption that people wouldn't bookmark articles that weren't worth reading.

So far, I've been impressed with both of these sites. Worth a look.

[HarryT]

That's very interesting indeed, Mike; thanks for pointing it out.

[HamsterRage]

Agreed, those are interesting sites. Note that they seem to be associated with http://www.instapaper.com/ which is neat itself.