Month: October 2005

I’m not sure I get it. Via The RSS Weblog, I read about Blogarithm, which lets you know via e-mail that a blog you follow has updated.

Huh?

I do know RSS is not (yet!) for everyone, but I hadn’t thought there still was even a sliver of market opportunity for doing update notification via e-mail. But then I thought about my own behavior. I still sign up for e-mail alerts in certain circumstances, both because e-mail often demands action and because not all services yet offer RSS. So e-mail is definitely still lingua franca when it comes to information transmission. Still… for blogs, where RSS is a native tongue? Hmmm… didn’t we see this movie? Where’s Spyonit now?

Paul Ford, in Followup/Distraction, says there “at least” two kinds of distractions, wide and narrow. My abstracted definitions follow (though you’ll want to read the short essay):

• Wide = time wasted you will never get back.
• Narrow = time wisely spent chasing a thread whose unraveling may tie up a loose end.

Can you tell the difference at first? Probably, if you give the “look at the shiny new thing” impulse a half-second pause to consider the choice. As Ford says:

I’m smarter, then, with my computer on, but not much deeper.

Deep, to me, is the capability to focus on the goals, not the competition. Dick is talking about business, but competition rarely feels limited to the workplace. I don’t think blogging makes me deeper, but it is less shallow than simply consuming, which I do often enough. [Via 43 Folders]

I’m nearly caught up on the life I put on hold while News.com was re-introducing itself a short while ago. Carving pumpkins, reading feeds, exercising (a little bit), and thinking about various tidbits I want to blog. But not tonight.

Well, except for this Fortune article from Friday, where David Kirkpatrick tell readers about Big Media’s Challenge: Taking on the Tech Giants. In the article, he uses What’s Hot and Big Picture as two example of where CNET News.com is mixing technology with media to make a better experience.

In my first go-round at CNET (Snap, NBCi), I described the company as a media technology company trying to become a technology media company. I think it’s even more complicated than that now, but if Kirkpatrick is to be believed, that mixed heritage will serve CNET Networks well. I hope so… I love the intersection. Lots of crashes, but a pretty exciting place all the same!

What kind of day is it going to be when you wake up to find Slashdot comment on the possibility of The Princess Bride being made into a musical? I think a good day.

There are the usual posts about why this non-technical piece of rumor/news was posted on Slashdot, and one commenter called the kettle black, scoring 5 for insightful:

Erm, wouldn’t the story of a pretty girl who rewards with her devotion the poor and unlucky but hard-working and cleverly inventive young lad with a taste for ironic word-play be of significant interest to your generic young male geek?

Or have their mating habits changed?

With 165 comments so far, not the most striking thread on Slashbot, but works for me.

OK, it’s been a long haul, but the News.com redesign is live, with new services, a new look, a new width, and a new tagline… just the award-winning reporting stays the same.

Just for good measure, we threw in a list, the Blog 100. Everybody loves to hate lists, either because they are on them or are not on them. No matter — the point is that some people may find it useful to read these blogs. That’s the point.

I’ve answered hundreds of reader emails during the beta fortnight, and it’s very cool to be reminded that there is an audience, loyal readers who care about what you do. I love corresponding with readers, although I’ll admit to a bit of fatigue right now.

I hope it’s all working in the morning! 😉

First, I got excited that a Slashdot thread started about The Big Picture. Then I read the thread, and realized the initial post threw out the word “ontology” and led, oh, just about everyone down the wrong path. Ontology is not included in The Big Picture. Move on, start anew, look at the feature, and decide whether it’s useful or not based on what it does, not some academic label that is misapplied here.