blogs – marked for death?

October 31, 2008 under Blogging

Being that today is All Hallows’ Eve, history tells us that this is the day where the line blurs between the living and the dead. As such, we don costumes to blend in with the creatures from the nether region so as not to rouse their interest. Do you want to get groped by somebody whose been deceased for hundreds of years? I didn’t think so.

According to Wired Magazine, the mag that I refer to as “coffee table tech”, has declared the death of the blog. They believe that people now prefer to generate content via Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook rather than by blogging. To be fair, looking at the “Chris Elsewhere” sidebar on this website o’ mine, you can see that I post my thoughts and ideas very often (compared to my blog) via Twitter, which I also cross-post to my Facebook status. I also frequently share links that I find interesting with my Google Reader shared items and you can always know what music I’m listening to via my Last.fm profile. And if you want to aggregate all of this into one location, my FriendFeed profile brings all of the above together in a centralized location.

So am I letting my blog die while I move onto other things? Not at all. Blogging takes time, and that’s often something that I don’t have. If you’re crazy and actually enjoy reading the things that I write, I will still post the longer things here. But I also encourage you to join me in the conversations elsewhere such as Twitter and FriendFeed.

Now gimme some candy!

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do bloggers have too much free time?

February 19, 2007 under Blogging

Admittedly, I haven’t been posting as often as I usually do these past couple of weeks. I’ve been doing a lot of contract programming gigs in my free time lately, and I’ve found little time to do anything else, such as post something on this blog o’ mine. Which leads me to ponder…is the reason bloggers blog because they don’t have anything else to do? 😉

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blahg, blahg, blahg

October 10, 2006 under Blogging, RSS

There’s some RSS bashing going on over at 37 Signals. Greg Story mentions that RSS is sucking the fun and sense of discovery out of the Internet. He pines for the days when we’d surf aimlessly amidst plenty of horrendous “Geocities” web sites (hey, I had one of those with Chico) and uncover a few gems. Random surfing can be fun, but…

The web continues to amass content, and I usually don’t have time to randomly surf the web. There are sites that I would visit on a daily basis, and as such I subscribe to those sites’ RSS feeds instead. Everything I want to read is retrieved and sorted for me by my feed aggregator of choice, Google Reader. As new items are posted on those sites, Google Reader gets them for me. I could be in front of any computer in the world with an Internet connection, and all of my feeds are there waiting for me. Sure, I may not see the sites’ colour schemes, layout, sexy new rounded corners on their nav bar, etc. That doesn’t bother me; it’s the content that I’m after in most cases. If I want to see the design, I can easily get to the original site from Google Reader. And it doesn’t stop with text. I subscribe to audio and video podcasts (should I say “netcasts” instead?) via iTunes, which is again, driven by RSS.

RSS = convenience. It enables the content I’m interested in to be delivered to me, and eliminates the manual task of going out and getting it myself. Back in the good ol’ days, it was a fun game to guess who could be calling everytime the phone rang. Now, thanks to caller ID, we can see who’s calling us and refuse to answer if it’s a telemarketer, prank call or just somebody we don’t feel like talking to at that moment. There came a point where the telephone transitioned from novelty to commodity to neccessity. Our lives become more complicated as time marches on, and anything thing that can save time and weed out the distractions and dead-ends is welcome, IMO. RSS saves time for me on the web- pure and simple.

On an nostalgic aside, I remember having the Pointcast and BackWeb clients installed on my computer when I was in university. It was 1998 and “push technology” was all the rage. While they were pretty big clients and the data often took a while to download on a 28.8Kbps dorm room dial-up connection, the idea worked reasonably well. Thanks to lightweight XML, RSS is welcome improvment to “push”.

PS: Subscribe to my feed 🙂

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