blog (January, 2003)
conspicuous consumption
I said yesterday that Miles probably never watched a documentary. I wonder about the lives of persistent creators; whether they are too busy producing to pay much attention to what others are doing. Miles obviously listened to (-- at least while playing with --) other jazz musicians, and I remember reading in his autobiography that he listened to contemporary "classical" music at home: Bartok, Khachaturian, Ravel. But how many CTO's read Slashdot? How many high profile actors go out to the movies, or sports stars watch Monday-night football?
I've cut back writing here quite a bit, somewhat because I don't feel like saying much right now. At the same time, though, my consumption of blogs has risen. This latter fact is partly due to the ease that RSS & newsreader aggregation provides, but I wonder if there is some inverse proportionality in my consuming and producing.
This medium, like jazz, is collaborative, though -- I'd say "A-List Bloggers" consume quite a bit, as well as produce. Nevertheless, I'm going to cut back on my blogreading somewhat, and keep an eye on the effects. I've always prided myself on having no attractions or entanglements in things like TV series and professional sports. Even though I can justify positives of net surfing and newsreading, it's, all the same, a similar vice, and I regret the vicariousness of reading about what other people are doing instead of doing, myself.
new syndication options
Attempting to resolve my syndications deliberations from a few days ago, I've revamped the RSS provisions for my blog. On the new syndication page, I'm offering a number of different feed formats.
If you are using a newsreader, feel free to choose a format that suits you, and even if you aren't particular about these things, please change the feed address: I've changed the location of the default rss file. Apologies to anyone subscribed who has suffered the constant format changes of the feed.
Hopefully, I can get back to some regular programming, (let's go bowling,) now.
Running-Blog.com
I've been wondering for some time now how Branton's Running-Log site fits in with the blog world. I journal here, and I journal there, but for different reasons and with different formats and usages. Yet, I'd still like to be able to automatically incorporate a daily mileage entry in my running log as a short one-liner in my blog, linking to the workout entry for further info.
Most people will still do plain old blogging, lucky if they use a title or main link.
Many will occasionally use a structure. Especially as Blog This buttons proliferate. So you can post an SAP invoice to your intranet blog, for example.
Others will find a few formats that tie in closely with a deep interest or passion, or their jobs. A runner's diary. A movie review. A project status report.
-- Phil Wolff
Phil Wolff's entry on semantic blogging holds some insights on how specialized journals, reviews, recipes, invoices, etc. can exist as different forms of the same foundation. Qlogger is doing this, and even has a working Running Log template.
Part of what makes Running-Log.com great, to me, are the team and coaching features. But maybe those can be duplicated in a similar manner with specialization in aggregation.
Another team just signed up for the meet, B -- time to buy a new set of racing spikes ;-)
RSS & TrackBacking
Some time ago, I jumped onto the RSS aggregation bandwagon (what's RSS?) to facilitate blog and news source consumption. Shrook is an excellent RSS newsreader for Mac OS X, with features and design that suit me more than NetNewsWire. I'm waiting on a just a few of the blogs I read to provide feeds.
Tonight I did a little work on my own blog. I've updated the RSS index to include full entries and photos, instead of just excerpts; something I like to see in other feeds I read. Thanks here to etc.'s MT RSS template. I've also opened up my entries to TrackBack pings, (what's TrackBack?) Thanks goes to Jeff from Beans for Breakfast for his lightweight TrackBacking method that I borrowed.
I'm more excited every day about how much this new medium is moving. I love watching how quickly the ripples not only move across the pond, but continually feed back into eachother.
Unlike traditional journalism, which seeks to provide complete information in a working final form, blogging is often exploratory. It's about what we are trying to learn, rather than about what I (or my journal) already know.
-- Doc Searls, Entrevue de Doc Searls by Michel Dumais