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Green Options - a community blog

Joining the ranks of other group authored green slanted blogs (including Treehugger and Gristmill) comes a newcomer Green Options. I recognise a few of the writers, such as Jeff from sustainablog, Preston from Jetson Green and Amy from It’s the environment stupid.

It’s early days yet - the blog is only a week or so old in the public domain, so I’m not in a position to say if it will offer more of the same or a radically different slant on things compared to Treehugger. Given I already subscribe to at least 3 of the authors, there’s a good chance it will aggregate their content, meaning fewer feeds to follow. But this leads on to another problem, which I already experience with Treehugger. With such wide content, not everything on there is relevant to me.

For these large multi-author, wide topic blogs I like to see separate feeds for particular authors or topics. When this doesn’t exist I usually get round this by scanning the feed titles in Google Reader using the ‘list’ option. For those posts which catch my eye, I can then click through to read. This also means that those posts which might not immediately be obvious as interesting to me get picked up (for instance if I only subscribed to posts about buildings, I wouldn’t ever see articles on food, which is a secondary field of interest, of which I might only read 20% of posts). This is less a comment on multi-author blogs and more a wish for a super intelligent feed aggregator which can know what I want to read. Which is veering dangerously into “Big brother is watching you” territory, so I’ll stick within my comfort zone of scanning and picking.

Green Options does actually allow me the option of subscribing to particluar authors, as well as the complete content, so bonus points there. You have the option of clicking through to a particular author and seeing a full list of all their posts. I’m guessing what I might do is subscribe to the general blog until I get to know who I read or don’t read and adjust my feeds to suit.

I also have the option of subscribing to Green Buildings as a feed, which might be more useful than seperate authors as there are currently at least 5 authors writing on this topic. But as I hinted above, I would miss out on random posts which might interest me.

All in all, Green Options seems a robust site, with plenty of subscription options and some well regarded, seasoned bloggers contributing. My only gripe is the US focus of the posts, which is unsurprising given the majority of bloggers are based there.

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