I have a love-hate relationship with Slate. Slate is an online magazine in the vein of Salon, but without the subscription fee. That was formerly because it was owned by Microsoft (but free from Microsoft editorial powers).

I have been reading Slate off and on for quite a few years, and still do after being sold to Washington Post. Many articles are quite interesting, and generally poignant (I get tired of reading articles that take 30 minutes). However, I find that there is also a lot of noise; articles that I don’t care about at all.

To exacerbate this problem, the design of Slate is such that their headlines are quirky and uninformative. You generally need to read the 10 word summary about what the article is about to truly understand what you may end up reading.

Recently though, Slate performed a redesign, and while the confusing headlines are still there, the more interesting articles are now brought to your attention under the most read/blogged/emailed section. This is great and makes me much happier with visiting their site. I can open all the links in the most read section and then skim the rest of the page. Now I only wish that they had a RSS feed for their Mosts.

Also, can you believe that Slate has been around for 10 years! The internet’s getting old.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: rant, webgeek