Reluctant Blogger

Now that I’m finally getting moved into a personal blog, I’m trying to decide what to do about links and bookmarking. Specifically:

I frequently end the day with 40 and sometimes as many as 100+ tabs open in Firefox. These open tabs represent things I stumbled across (whether by design or by accident) that I’m interested in following up on/reading further when and if I have time. (Have I mentioned that the net is *brutal* on philomaths?… How are we supposed to get any work done? :-)

I’ve tried a variety of systems for managing this situation, including most of the major social bookmarking sites. My favorite has been furl, because of the built-in linkrot protection, and I’ve used it on and off for a number of years.

On consideration, though, I think even furl is still a suboptimal solution for me. Reasons:

• Intermittent slow response times are frustrating (this is true of all the majors - at least from here)
• 3rd party service is not included in my regular backup process. 
• Search facility is mediocre
• Linking is a powerful social gesture, especially amongst lower traffic blogs. Even if a link to a blog post is just 1 of 40 in a daily linkdump, it still represents a piece of my attention that I’ve given that person, and can act as an expression of my interest in the topic. I’d like to let the author know that I noticed and appreciated their writing - - even if just in a small way. I don’t think that being one more "add" on delicious or furl accomplishes this in quite the same way. It’s a little like the difference between sending someone a personal note, and being one of a dozen signers on a group birthday card — it’s just not quite the same thing.

So I think what I’m going to do is create a links category, modify "the loop" so that links posts are not displayed on the main blog (since I have so many of them they would overwhelm any other posts) turn off trackback pings for that section so that I don’t spam any conversations, and then create a Firefox plugin to make the recording of all open tabs a 1-click process. If I get ambitious, I may also add a spider to create my own mini-furl archive of the linked articles for linkrot protection.

I’d be interested in hearing from anybody who’s got an opinion on this, pro or con. Does my approach sound reasonable? Am I missing an essential part of the value proposition of social bookmarking sites? If so, what?

Penelope Trunk a.k.a. the Brazen Careerist has a useful little essay on perfectionism up at Yahoo finance.  Almost as interesting to me as the original piece is the response from the readership there. Two stars based on > 1000 votes?…

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To Mike, who was asking me yesterday why I always make copies of webpages that I reference in important (to me) blog posts…

Because you never know when you’re gonna go looking for something important and just find a panda giving you the finger instead.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Dear Business Week, You cited an April study by the AeA in your "News Analysis" piece (your label, not mine) titled "The Myth of High-Tech Outsourcing" It says in part:

…High-tech employees are back in demand. The U.S. technology industry added almost 150,000 jobs in 2006, according to an Apr. 24 report by the American Electronics Assn. (AeA), an industry trade group. That was the largest gain since 2001, before the implosion of the tech bubble resulted in the loss of more than 1 million jobs in three years. The findings counter concerns—sometimes voiced by opponents of outsourcing—that high-tech jobs are being sent overseas…

I think I’m missing something. I don’t see how you reach that conclusion from those numbers. Let me run the AeA’s numbers again, and see if I can spot my mistake…

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For Andrea: News coverage of the recently discovered (and now possibly in the wild QuickTime exploit) is here.

"The vulnerability is in QuickTime, but any Java-enabled browser can be an exploit vector. No exclusions," said Forslof. TippingPoint confirmed this morning that IE 7 running on Vista — the browser that Microsoft touts as its most secure — could be a route to a PC hijack.

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A friend of mine asked me today what all the recent talk about “Web 2.0” was about. Knowing that he was familiar with linux, my response was “chmod 777 web“.

My blog feeds Tumblr. Twitter feeds Tumblr. Twitter feeds 30boxes, which in turn feeds back into Twitter. Flickr feeds everything. Tumblr feeds everything too, but then I’ve got duplicate feeds. I need a nap.

— Sarah is making me realize how necessary Yahoo! Pipes is for the new internet

via David’s tumblog(?) tumbleblog(?) blog(?)

That last bit reminds me that I miss English

You know, before twittr, flickr and blog were verbs. Or even words, for that matter.

When “googol” was still a really big number

When not all writing was preceded by “http://”

When periods came at the ends of sentences. Or at least at the ends of words. (I’m looking at you del.icio.us)

But all the cool kids drop the vowels now, so I guess that should be “I miss nglsh.”

Oops. Still have vowels. “mss nglsh.”

Dang - punctuation has to go too. “mss nglsh”

I may need more than a nap.

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For the record, my twitter account is here, and my tumblr is here. Yes, I am aware of the irony, thanks.

In keeping with the “principle of keystroke conservation” I’m answering a quick question from a friend here.

The card suit characters are below, along with some others from this article on the Wordpress Codex

As noted above, this blog is primarily a personal notebook, so like everything else here, these links are mainly for my own reference. That said, feel free to peruse and see if there’s anything you like.

I’ve set up this blog so that only “real” stories go out in the main RSS feed - if you’re reading this in a feed reader, than I’ve misconfigured something, and I apologize for gunking up your inbox with random link propagation. The rest of the kinks in the publishing process should be worked out this week. Thanks for your understanding!

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Today @ PC World Google in Privacy Hot Seat, Again

I was actually going to use the nuclear metaphor in my Google v. Microsoft wrap-up post cautioning about the dangers of extremely concentrated power, regardless of how much we trust the holders, but decided it might read as over the top. Apparently the editors at PC World didn’t share my reservations (Note to self: Must Loosen Up If We’re Gonna Keep Up With This Blogging Thing)

AOL Search Logs

I was aware of this story when it broke, but never looked for myself because it felt like invading someone else’s privacy. Since I’ve now explicitly started blogging about, among other things, privacy issues — I followed the link in the PC World story this time and read some for myself. The one I’ve linked above, from user 711391 ’s search history is really quite something. It’s an entire little morality play, written entirely in Google search terms. One commenter says that he’s been doing dramatic readings of it in his podcast which really seems like probably the most appropriate treatment.

Then, of course, there are just the funny parts as one other commenter highlights:

what do men think is sexy
how to be sexy
female pirate costumes

what else is there to say, really? :)

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The Wordpress crash-course continues:

Writing With Post Excerpts and Feed Excerpts in Mind « Lorelle on WordPress

Customizing the Read More « WordPress Codex

WordPress Feeds « WordPress Codex

How to use FeedBurner with Wordpress without .htaccess file | skriker

Using FeedBurner, RssFwd, and GMail to create a daily blog posting from del.icio.us to Blogger « :: jay’s blog ::

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M wants me to take a closer look at this; she likes the info and agent data. Initial impression is of a LinkedIn clone, but I need to dig deeper before passing judgement: ZoomInfo

Miscellaneous design inspiration that I want to be able to find more easily in the future: (Authentic Boredom ~ Cameron Moll)

Rogue WP plugin hosed my site feeds. Everything should be working correctly now. Thanks to Andrew for bringing this to my attention.

How did it get to be 3:30 am again?….