Bump on a Blog is a new feature on useful or interesting sites across the internet. I spend a ton of time each week looking for headlines for the show or ways to increase At the Buzzer’s networking, and certain places have popped out due to their strong writing or utility. I figure those places deserve a shout-out.

Fark

At the Buzzer has come a long way since its beginnings more than a year ago, which is to say we suck a lot less at doing radio than we did back in the first few episodes. Along the way, we’ve added a variety of special guests, introduced a half dozen new segments, and picked up new audio equipment so that we don’t sound like we record the show in the middle of a tunnel.

Still, a few things have remained constant since back then. For example, all three cast members have appeared in every episode because we thought it was important to have the same nucleus every time. One of the other big mainstays has been our Headlines segment, which has been in place since episode one (and unlike Buzzerbeater, hasn’t even had a name change along the way).

Headlines was basically a direct ripoff of millions of other podcasts out there that try to present the news in an informative and funny fashion. For the first 10 episodes or so, it was also our strongest segment by far — we were still working out the kinks in secondary segments and also just in doing the show in general. Once we got more comfortable with putting our personalities out there, some of those other segments surpassed it, but Headlines has always been solid.

One of the other reasons Headlines is easy to slot into the planner every episode is that there’s no shortage of idiotic people and ideas in the world to talk about. Not a week goes by where I don’t stumble across an animal acting like a human or a person taking leave of their senses and doing something inane. And that’s where Fark comes in.

Fark was started before the turn of the millennium, but it really started to take off a few years ago. It’s essentially a news aggregate that pulls together user submissions for the most interesting headlines on the Web. Fark sorts those into useful categories (like Sports and Business) and tags (like Stupid and Florida) and adds a minimalist comment system to each link. And…that’s about it.

I stumbled on Fark a few years ago, thinking it was a pretty amusing way to keep track of news, but eventually stopped paying attention. Friend of the show Andy Smith gets the credit for mentioning Fark to me back when he guest starred on an earlier episode, because up until that point I hadn’t really thought of using the site as a resource for AtB.

I have an assortment of other places I go to look at ridiculous stories and pick out the best ones for the show (such as the Huffington Post’s Weird News or the links that friends post on Facebook about silly things), but Fark is usually the go-to choice.