(Source)
As promised last time, here (yes, click the link) is this week’s new, improved Korean Gender Reader. But, frankly I’m disappointed with it. While using paper.li did save a lot of time, and the result does look much better than my regular posts, several stories I tweeted are missing; most stories you have to click the “more” links to see; their categories are completely meaningless; and the inability to choose my own descriptions to links means the headlines often give absolutely no indication of the contents (yes, I can hardly criticize given the headline to my own last post, but still!).
Without much more editorial control then, in hindsight paper.li only seems appropriate for daily collections of links really.
So, apologies for the failed experiment, and next week I’ll revert back to the old system. Suggestions for how to save time with it are still very welcome, but probably simplest and best is if I limit the number of links to the 5 most interesting stories I come across each day, coming to a total of 35 a week. Compared to the 70-100+ I normally post, that doesn’t sound too onerous, and of course all the extra stories not linked to in the KGR posts will be still available via the Facebook Page or my Twitter Feed.
The Grand Narrative 
Personally, I think you work hard enough as it is, so if you’re going to move from 70-100 links to 30-40 I think that’s more than reasonable. As for time saving ideas, maybe instead of linking individual stories from other K-blogs you could have a side bar with perma-links to their blog(?) (Not as specific or elegant, but many of those blogs contribute almost on a weekly basis to the Gender Reader anyway, in my opinion.)
On a totally unrelated note, I just got around to watching “Peppermint Candy,” and I must say that I disagree with your review. I really, really liked it. I agree with some of your points, but I overall I though it was both enthralling and intriguing. (Just my two cents.)
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Thanks for the suggestion. But although it’s true that probably about 33% of the links come from the same 5 or 6 blogs, there’s still the links from all the others and the news stories to include. And the idea of the KGR is that I’ve already found the interesting stories in those blogs and sites for you, rather than you having to go to each blog and site individually and then find them for yourself (assuming that there’s even anything new and/or that you want to see there too).
Either way, probably just keeping the number of links down is/was the only change needed really.
As for Peppermint Candy, I’d probably be less harsh if I saw it for the first time now rather than over 3 years ago — 2 years later, I felt much the same way about Paju as I did Peppermint Candy for instance, but acknowledged its high quality — but still, most of my criticisms would definitely still remain. We’ll just have to agree to disagree about it sorry!
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“I limit the number of links to the 5 most interesting stories I come across each day”
Excellent idea! I always thought a tighter selection of articles would improve quality and limit waste of time.
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I also heard scoop.it is somewhat similar to paper.li. I really don’t know any details since I’ve never used either of them. Other than that, cutting down links seems to be the only solution right now
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Thanks; I heard about that too. I’ll look into it.
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While I don’t have any suggestions about how to make your job easier, I do want to let you know that I appreciate the work you put in. The Korean Reader has been one of my favorite resources for discovering real conversations and perspectives about Korean life as opposed to the dramatized, popular image that is so prevalent in America today. So….thanks :-).
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Thanks very much!
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As a side note, I just saw that the first commenter’s UID was t. fraser….
My husband’s name starts with a T. I did a double take.
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