I asked Jason Kottke to talk about the creative process for how he goes about collecting information for kottke.org. Perhaps my first encounter with Jason’s name was in a magazine article about full-time bloggers. Jason is a soft spoken person and I appreciated his calm style of presentation. He began with the assertion, “There’s a lot of misinformation out there. It makes our world unnecessarily complex.” By Jason’s estimate, there is about 7.1 quadrillion bytes generated each day by newspapers all around the world. I was surprised to learn about Jason’s strong need to maintain editorial integrity by being sure to verify his posts by checking multiple sources. I gravitate to Jason’s blog for its simplicity, and I was happy to learn of his care to instill trust in his readership.

He scans about 100 online pages and 100 real pages with a requisite “one poem per day.” This latter comment was truly poetic–pun intended. But he said that his best posts are usually found randomly through serendipity. It seems that there are a variety of random URL generator sites out there which after a few casts of the die I understood Jason’s point quite clearly.

Finally, I was excited to hear that he generally blogs with “a couple longer posts with eight shorter posts.” Jason’s site feels fairly unstructured but seems to work extremely well. I didn’t realize that it was because he has a clear sense of how each post is organize-d. It is this simple combination of trust and organization that underlies his journey to “find out what the Web is saying about the world.”