As you all know, I’ve occasionally written comments/feedback to big blogs I read about their overall content, but since I certainly can’t expect them to respond only to my own feedback and change their tunes (esp. with respect to diet/health/exercise topics which I often find noisome), I’ve started filtering their feeds to my Google Reader myself.

How? With Yahoo Pipes, which is a drag/drop type programming utility specifically for aggregating and filtering feeds and other data on the web. It’s pretty neat and usually pretty easy to use, as long as you’re careful and you test as you go.

I already built a pipe for Lifehacker that filters out posts to do with the “diet” category and the “health” category (and may need to change it to add “cooking”). I also built a pipe for BoingBoing that for now only filters out non-unique posts (by title) but may in the future implement a similar filtering mechanism for certain categories.

I just left a comment on a BoingBoing post.

The post (about some hugely calorific dish at Outback Steakhouse): http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/11/worst-food-in-americ.html
The comment (not sure if it’ll be approved, so I can’t yet link it directly):

I’m thinking you guys (the creators of BoingBoing) probably don’t care, because you are hip and probably all thin, cool type people (whether this is because you count calories/diet, I do not know).

But you must know that there is a significant membership of yours, or passive readers of yours who are fat, and who, further, do not diet, and have no interest in doing so, nor in counting calories.

Surely a blog as cool as yours has noticed the growing national awareness of the fat acceptance movement recently. And the growing numbers of studies coming out that do not attribute fatness to laziness or other synonyms, or necessarily to one’s diet.

We (as I am one of these people) are probably tired of your posts like these, where you talk about calories, which leads to talking about eating patterns and dieting and healthiness. Why? Because I think we have had enough of those sorts of discussions in public fora.

I’m not discounting the great discussion of foods (that sound sometimes interesting and sometimes not) that also derives from this original post, but I think it’s possible to get there via other means, and not just decrying how bad for you a particular food is.

Just a datapoint for you. I don’t wish a flamewar and I’m not trying to troll, just trying to give you honest feedback about your post topics.

Anyhow. Onward.