What Are Your 5 Favorite Sites?
Being out in the field looking for a job is certainly a change of pace. Over the last 3 years I can’t count the number of interviews I have been a part of. In the last 6 years I probably been on the other side of the table a handful of times.
I went in for an interview last week and everything was going pretty good. In my opinion any interview should just come across as a good conversation for both parties. Not one side asking questions and the other one answering them. I felt we were having a good conversation that was flowing and painless. The hour we spent talking seemed to fly by. Towards the end of the conversation the interviewer asked me a simple question and I dropped it! It was something so basic, something I have asked candidates hundreds of times. A question that you ask just to get a sense of a candidates web savvy, “What are your 5 favorite sites?”. And I dropped it! I remember stammering out, “ESPN of course…”. The one site any employer would rather not hear, “The World Wide Leader” in killing productivity. I think I also threw out Mashable.com but for the life of me I can’t remember anything else I might have said.
Even as words were coming out of my mouth I knew this was a question I should have a very easy answer for. After the interview later into the evening I was still thinking about the botch and actually trying to answer it for myself. The patterns in which I consume information have shifted. In the past I would have 9-14 bookmarks and maybe 10-15 rss feeds to go thru on a regular basis. But when work starts piling up the last thing I had time to do was go and peruse sites. I would bookmark, star, tag, digg and add to delicious. But then the list of tagged items would be long and over the course of time the list of must visit sites and rss feeds grew unmanageable.
It took me awhile, but then I realized, I don’t have 5 favorite sites! I still get information, links and opinions, but it is not necessarily from an aggregate site like Digg. Instead of being directed to content that is surfaced by general popularity, I have chosen to be influenced by individuals that I respect and trust. Twitter, and the people I follow has somewhat replaced my need to subscribe to any particular site. And the content that the individuals do surface tends to have a more direct connection with my interests versus most popular. A lot of the times I am connecting with the individuals who are writing the content for the sites we visit. For example I follow:
NPR NEWS
Writer for Ad Age
Sr Analyist, Forrester
NASA
Founder of Digg
Founder of Mashable.com
Founder of BigSpaceship
This is a good cross section of news, science, advertising, social media, and technology trends. And for the most part these people are pretty consistent with engaging thier audience. Not that it is necessary, but you will watch or hear about stories on twitter before I see the article come out from AdAge (who I also follow) or NPR. Twitter has cut down the amount of scanning I need to do (but don’t have time for) by 60%. I obviously still do explore on my own, and if I had to pick 5 sites (after much deliberation) they would be:
Adobe Labs
QBN (News Today)
Slate Magazine
The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Mashable
