eclecticism

With all the different specialized blogging, pseudo-blogging, or linking websites and services available these days, I’m starting to lose track of how I’m ‘supposed’ to do this one-to-many online communication thing.

It used to be easy. Back in the ‘old days,’ you’d hand-edit a simple HTML file with whatever you wanted to put on it, whenever you wanted to put something on it. Maybe it’d be a link, maybe it’d be a screed. Maybe people would see it, maybe they wouldn’t. Pretty simple.

Then blogging arrived to make everything simpler. Gone were the days of hand-editing HTML and managing pages directly, now you had specialized software that handled the details for you. Databases to store the information, automatically dynamically generated pages, comments, the whole shebang. Still, content-wise, it was still a grab-bag. Some posts would be long, detailed, and in-depth; other posts would be a single small link or quip; sometimes you’d get lists of links that caught someone’s eye.

Now, however, you’ve got a veritable plethora of specialized sites to handle all the different types of information you might want to share. The ones that I either use (in some fashion) or have pinged my radar strongly enough to trigger this little round of rambling, in rough order of depth:

1. Twitter: 140-character messages originally meant to be IM-style ‘status updates,’ but now often used for ‘nanoblogging’ — short, pithy messages. No more, no less. Since brevity is the soul of wit, we will all tweet brief.

2. del.icio.us: Social bookmarking that has evolved far more towards the social side than the bookmarking side. While I’m sure there are plenty of people that actually use their del.icio.us account as a substitute for the ‘bookmarks’ menu in their web browser, I see far more who use it as a ‘microblog’ (often displayed as a sidebar to their main weblog) wherein each post is a single link with short commentary.

3. Tumblr: “The easiest way to share yourself,” according to their splash page. I’ve not bothered setting up a ‘tumblelog’ for myself, but this appears to fill in the ‘miniblogging’ niche, with an emphasis on simple link and media inclusion. Apparently, “this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.” Honestly, I’m still a little confused by the niche that this one fills (or attempts to fill).

4. Weblogs (the usual suspects): Finally, the sites and software packages that used to be simple ‘blogging’ tools are now…what? Is this still ‘blogging’? Or is it now ‘macroblogging’?

I’m starting to feel like I’m losing track of what kind of post is ‘supposed’ to go to which service, and I’m more and more wondering if it’s even worth continuing to keep them all separate. However, there are occasional advantages to the specializations of the services (del.icio.us’s tagging and quick bookmarklets, the dedicated clients that are available for many of the services) that keep me using them instead of just using ‘old-school’ weblog posts for everything.

If I had the time (which student life prevents) and design skills (which simply don’t exist), I’d love to put some effort into seeing if I could assemble an über skin for my site that would streamline everything into one stream-of-consciousness approach (along the lines of what I see on Daring Fireball and kottke.org) but still allow me to use those services that I find useful. It doesn’t seem horrendously complex: plugins (some of which are probably available in some form or another) that would automatically convert each post at one service or another into its own post on my weblog, default posting options for each type of post (perhaps tweets don’t need comments enabled, for instance), and possibly some CSS work that would distinguish the types of posts.

But then, would that still be too complex? There’s always the question of what happens when one service or another is having connection issues (which I keep running into with Twitter — apparently there’s some avian flu going around over there). Perhaps I’d still be better off just coming back around to using my weblog for everything. Consolidate everything in one place — after all, there’s absolutely no real reason why I “have” to ramble on for a certain length for the post to be worthy of going on the blog, rather than being posted as a tumble, del.icio.us link, or tweet.

There’s a few things I’d miss, though, which may keep me from doing this. The in-built social networking of places like Twitter are nice, though not necessarily a dealbreaker. Being able to have my tweets and del.icio.us links show up on my Facebook profile is nice. Sometimes I like the compartmentalization (on the weblog, for instance, ‘big’ posts in the center, tweets and links over in the sidebar), sometimes I feel like it’s unnecessarily over complicating things.

Meh. I’ve gone on to just rambling now. Maybe that 140 character limit isn’t so much of a bad thing, huh?

A couple years ago, I made a rather weak stab at participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), in which participants attempt to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. Unsurprisingly, given how I constantly seem to have multiple projects going on at any one time, I didn’t get very far. I’d still like to try again at some point, but I think that’ll have to wait ‘til I’m out of school.

This year, I think it’s worth trying for something a little more possible: NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month. Inspired by NaNoWriMo, it presents a much more feasible goal for most people. Given that my posting lately has been rather sparse (assuming that my del.icio.us links and my Twitters don’t count), I think it’s worth a shot. Here’s my profile, since this drops me into yet another social networking site….

Of course, I’ve already missed a day, since I didn’t find out about NaBloPoMo until today (indirectly through cygnoir, more directly through Thom), but better late than never, right?

I’ve been seeing rumblings about coComment for a few weeks now, but finally decided to take a closer look when I noticed it up and running on a post at The Republic of T. coComment is a service that lets you track the comments you’ve made on other weblogs, keep track of when people have responded to them, and so on…basically, trying to make sure that those comments you leave don’t just disappear into the great bit bucket of the ‘net.

So, I’ve signed up, and have enabled coComment integration on this site (for all future entries, at least…all entries on the main page have been rebuilt, the rest of the 3801 entries will be rebuilt eventually) — Movable Type integration was a snap with their included instructions. I don’t figure a huge percentage of my readers will be using it, but it’s there for those who want to.

“Bring on the Dancing Horses” by Echo and the Bunnymen from the album Pretty In Pink (1985, 4:00).

(via Pharyngula)

“24 Hours (part 2) (full mix)” by Kleptones, The from the album 24 Hours (full mix) (2006, 1:14:22).

(via Dad)

“Ulhuru” by Medicine Drum from the album Return to the Source: The Chakra Journey (1996, 7:00).

This is just sad — sixteen of the twenty-five displayed TrackBack pings to Seablogs are TrackBack spam. Is anyone paying attention to moderating the site?

“Goody Two Shoes” by Adam and the Ants from the album Rock and Wave Vol. 1 (1982, 3:29).

A funny short-short story by Paul Di Filippo set in the near future after the collapse of the Internet:

> I HAD TO run a few errands downtown, but I hesitated to go. > > What if I ran into bloggers? > > Ever since the total, irretrievable collapse of the Internet in a chaos of viruses, worms, spam, terrorism and busts by the FBI anti-porn squad, that archaic species of human had become a bigger street menace than mimes, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or panhandlers ever were. > > […] I had almost gained the security of the lobby of my bank when my luck ran out, and I was accosted with no easy means of escape by a wild-eyed figure. > > Backed into an embrasure by the advancing apparition who had been cleverly lying in wait for prey, I was startled to recognize — beneath the grime, elf-locked hair, tattered clothing, and unkempt beard — a man I had known from his earlier life. > > […] The recognition was plainly one way. Doctorow’s crazed eyes betrayed no familiarity with my face. I was only another potential flesh-and-blood “hit” for his “site.” > > Doctorow carried a mud-splattered messenger’s satchel over one shoulder. From this bag he now removed an old-fashioned wirebound spiral notebook and pen. He made a tick mark on paper, recording my “visit.” Then he launched into his spiel. > > “Welcome to a directory of wonderful things, my friend! Get ready to be amazed, thrilled and astounded! I’m going to show you stuff you never believed existed, stuff that will brighten your life, enhance your senses and enlighten your consciousness! For instance — “

(via — no, no irony here — Boing Boing)

“Future is Not What it Used to Be, The” by Parallax1 from the album Parallax1 (1996, 5:46).

Jakob Nielsen recently published a list of the top ten weblog design mistakes. As I’ve done in the past with similar listings, I took a quick look to see how I feel my site fares against his list.

Read the rest of this entry »

The news that yesterday’s rumors are true and that NewsGator has acquired NetNewsWire is flying all over the ‘net right now. NewsGator posted a quick Q&A about the acquisition, which produced this little gem from NetNewsWire’s Brent Simmons:

> Q: Is Brent moving to Denver? Or Tennessee? > > Greg: Yes! > > Brent: No, I’ll be staying in Seattle. > > Greg: Darn it, I’m 0 for 2. Denver’s not such a bad place, you know. We have 4 seasons and everything! > > Brent: As a Macintosh user interface designer I like to simplify whenever possible. Four seasons is two too many. Seattle has two seasons, rainy and dry — anything more is too complex for new users.

Everyone’s favorite geeky office shlub takes a look at job-related weblogging today (click to enlarge, of course)…

“Dreaming (Libra)” by BT from the album Dreaming (2000, 9:18).

This is actually fairly simple, but you never know.

For ecto users who want to post LiveJournal-style links to LJ user accounts (such as djwudi) into a weblog entry on a non-LJ system:

1. Open Window > HTML Tags.

2. Click the + button to create a new tag set.

3. Paste the following code into the ‘opening tag’ box (as a single line):

   <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=%*">
   <img src="http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif" alt="[%*'s info]" width="17" height="17" /></a>
   <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/%*/"><b>
   

4. Paste the following code into the ‘closing tag’ box:

   </b></a>
   

5. Assign a command key sequence (optional, of course — I used option-command-J).

Viola! You’re done. Now, just type someone’s LJ username into a weblog post, select it, and choose the new tag set (or type the command key sequence you set), and the LJ-style link is created.

After a friend asked me a few questions about the basic HTML tags while trying to clear up some confusion, I went Googling for some sort of cheat sheet listing just the most basic tags. I couldn’t find one — just came up with a lot of full-blown tutorials or cheat sheets listing every tag in the book — so I tossed this together. Hopefully it helps.

I’m only looking at the tags most likely to be used in your standard, basic weblog post, so there won’t be much in the way of structural stuff here, just presentational. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m spending a little bit of time playing with the just-released public beta version of Movable Type 3.2 on a separate weblog. While I was tempted to just jump straight into upgrading this weblog straight away, I figured that it would be best to wait for a bit when I saw the list of already known bugs that still need to be squashed.

Still, I’m quite impressed with what I’ve seen so far, and it’s nice to have something of a ‘test bed’ to play with while work progresses towards the final version. Feel free to stop by and say hi if you’re curious.

“Dream Induction” by Emergency Broadcast Network from the album Telecommunication Breakdown (1995, 3:20).

Fun conversations and gadgetry at the Webloggers Meetup last night.

Phillip Torrone brought a bunch of old and new hardware, gadgets, and toys along, including an Apple eMate, a Newton, and his cell phone — which is actually an old rotary phone that he’s hacked the cell phone hardware into. Pretty impressive!

Chas and Pops and I spent some time talking about Podcasts, and the possibility of my turning my dj mixes into a podcast stream. I’m still not entirely sure if I’m going to move that way, but I’m at least running it around in my head.

Jake was wandering around interviewing anyone who’d sit still in his vicinity for more than a minute, and tossed a few questions my way. Look for some rather brainless-sounding pauses, “um”s and “aaahh…”s from me in an upcoming podcast from him at some point, if he doesn’t edit me out completely.

As things were winding down, I spent a little time chatting with Kristin and Ian, both first-time attendees. Much enjoyed were the possibilities of answering Jake’s “What tech issue would you ask your state representative about if you had the chance?” question with “Teledildonics”, and Kristin and Ian’s picture outside the local Department of Homeland Security office.

A walk home afterwards, accompanied for a while by Jake and Chas until they went off their respective directions, and the evening was done. Not bad at all.

“My Weakness” by Moby from the album Play (1999, 3:37).

Just a little something that amuses me. Though I’ve been posting regularly since November 2000, and have a few old weblog-style posts going all the way back to December 1995, it wasn’t until February of 2001 that I actually stumbled across the term ‘blogger’.

> So it appears I’ve (without really knowing or planning it) become one of the growing number of ‘bloggers’ on the web. Blogger? Well read on…

It’s kind of fun to be able to pinpoint the very day that I realized there was this “weblogging” thing going on…and to know that I’d been doing it for a good while before that.

Yeah. I’m an old-timer. :p

Looking at the Google AdSense for Feeds announcement, Scoble takes a moment to rank the various basic types of feeds that can be produced now:

> Here, let’s rank RSS feeds from worst (least useful for readers) to best. > > * Worst: headline only feeds with ads. > * Almost worst: partial text feeds with ads. > * Barely passable: partial text feeds without ads. > * Better: Full text feeds with ads. > * Best: Full text feeds with no ads. > > I’ll only subscribe to the bottom three kinds of feeds and if your content isn’t really “must read” (the New York Times, for instance) then you better stick with the bottom two. > > Again, when I subscribe to an RSS feed that means I want a long-term relationship. Think about what that means. How abusive of me do you want to be? On the readership side we get to decide how much abuse we’ll put up with. You might find that your readers won’t put up with much. In which case you’ll have to decide if a few extra bucks is worth a decreased readership.

Dead-on, I’d say.

The first two — ‘worst’ and ‘almost worst’ — would guarantee that I would stop reading that site if that were all they offered. At that point, I’d feel that I’m being treated as a consumer, rather than a reader.

I’ve got a few ‘barely passable’ feeds in my newsreader, but I try to make them as rare as possible. If I try to subscribe to a site and the default feed is partial-text, the first thing I’ll do is peek into the source code to see if I can find a full-text feed. Even if I do subscribe to a partial-text feed, those sites get far less readership from me than others do, as it’s rare that the provided summaries catch my interest enough to bring me to the site.

(And a quick aside here — if you’re determined to do a partial-text feed, would you at least take a moment to actually write summaries for your posts that the feed can use? The default “first 20 words” snippet is virtually pointless. Give me a reason to read everything you write, don’t just assume that I’ll automatically stop by anytime something new pops up…with 300+ feeds in my newsreader, I just don’t have time for that.)

Once we get up into the two ‘best’ options — full-text feeds, either with or without ads — the ads don’t bother me quite as much, for two reasons. Firstly, the text of the post is generally longer than the ad and the ad can be easily ignored if I’m so inclined; and secondly, with Google’s targeting technology that picks which ads to run based on content, it’s more likely that an ad will be topic-appropriate (and, therefore, more likely to potentially catch my eye) with a full-text feed.

Me, I’m still going to stay ad-less in my feed. Advertising just isn’t that big of a deal to me — I signed up for Google AdSense out of curiosity, and so far, there’s no reason to get rid of it. I limit the ads to a single spot (below the first post on my index page, and between the post and the comments on my individual pages) so they’re visible but not intrusive (at least, that’s the intent), and every few months I get a little bit of money from Google. Not much — about $300 a year — but these days, every little penny helps.

I do also participate in the Amazon Associates program and the iTunes Affiliates program, but neither of those has netted me much of anything. I think I’ve gotten about $10-$15 from Amazon in the past few years, and I haven’t seen squat from iTunes yet. I just don’t have the readership numbers for these programs to be really profitable…but then, that’s not exactly something I worry about this. If I’d gotten into this whole blogging thing for the money, I’d have gotten out of it years ago.

(That said…would it kill you to go shopping every so often? “)

“Real, The” by Davis, Don/Tech Itch from the album Animatrix: The Album (2003, 8:02).

Had a good time at the Webloggers Meetup last night. There were a few new faces in attendance, and lots of kids, which was fun — Jon and his wife Joy brought their three kiddos (Jon got a really nice profile shot of me, too), and Eric was there with his really cute little boy.

Some time ago at one of the Jason Webley concerts, a girl had come up to me and told me that I was apparently a doppelganger for her husband. Turns out that she and her husband were there last night, and after the story was told, a few of the people around us agreed that yes, there’s definitely a resemblance. Apparently it’s not quite as close as it was a while ago — I’ve let my hair grow out, and he’s shaved off his face fuzz — but if I’m going to have a twin running around town, I could certainly do worse than Matt May.

Much of the fun of the evening came not from those of us gathered for the Meetup, though, but instead from across the street where the hardcore Star Wars fans were lining up for that evening’s 12:01am first showing of Episode III. We’d all keep our eye on the crowd as we chatted, and occasionally the cry would go up — “Stormtrooper costume!” or “There’s Chewbacca!” or “Jawas!” — and a few of us would grab our cameras and head over to grab a few shots.

Best moment of the night, though?

Walking past the line of Star Wars fans, and having a kid in jeans, sweatshirt, and Darth Vader helmet point at my kilt and laugh.

Amused me to no end, that did…

“Rock the Casbah (Hot Tracks)” by Clash, The from the album Hot Tracks 15th Anniversary Collectors Edition (1997, 6:36).

Looks like the inevitable intrusion of advertising into RSS feeds just gained a major player, as Google’s Adsense for Feeds program has just been announced.

On the one hand, I can kind of see where quite a few people might be happy about this. As more and more people read their news through RSS feeds, fewer people are as likely to visit a website and see their ads, and revenue drops.

At the same time — hey, that’s one of the things I like about RSS feeds. While I’ve not yet unsubscribed from a feed because it started carrying advertising, it is a little bit annoying. Not very, at this stage, as so far all the ads are at the tail end of each post and can easily be ignored, but I’d still be happier without ads.

So, while I do use Google’s AdSense program on my site (as unobtrusively as possible while still allowing for the occasional check to hit my mailbox), I’ll not be dropping ads into any of my RSS feeds. The way I figure it, the miniscule amount of extra revenue it might generate isn’t at all offset by the annoyance it could cause my readers (and since the ads annoy me, I’ll work on the assumption that they probably annoy others, too).

“Lords of the Rhymes (Kool-Aid Brothers)” by Lords of the Rhymes (2003, 5:03).

Something I meant to mention a bit ago, but spaced — I’ve recently become one of the contributing authors to Seattlest, the Seattle-centric group weblog run by the Gothamist empire.

I’m tracking any posts I toss onto Seattlest on my del.icio.us account for quick access, and my posts can also be found via this listing on the Seattlest site. Lastly, here’s my author bio.

Getting involved was actually pretty flattering, as I was actually invited in, thanks to one of the local editors reading Eclecticism and keeping an eye on my Flickr photostream. Hard to say “no” to an invitation like that!

“Silo, No. 5 - Three” by User, The from the album Abandon (2003, 2:31).

I finally made it out to another Weblogger’s meetup! It was long past time, as the last time I’d made it out was back in November. While I don’t have much basis for comparison, it seemed to be a pretty good turnout again, 20-some people all told, I’d guess. People I know were there and can remember names or websites for include Anita Rowland, Chas, Chris Prillo, TDavid, Jake, Dayment, Jeannie, and Samantha, plus a bunch more people that my brain couldn’t hold onto names or URLs for. I’m sure Anita will have a full attendee list soon.

I’ve tossed some photos up into a photoset, named and tagged as much as possible. Of course, if anyone can identify any of the people I had to leave unnamed, comment and tag away!

(Photo courtesy of Chris Pirillo)

“Cornflake Girl” by Amos, Tori from the album Under the Pink (1994, 5:07).