More on Blogs

Someday I will write an entire piece on blogs, but right now I’m too busy reading and writing blogs to write properly about blogs. But besides, I’m just formulating my thoughts, and a blog is a great place to do just that.

Information overload has to stop at some point. Our mental survival depends on it.

Ed. note--I have hidden most all of this entry. I am still hashing it out. Check back later.

refs: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

Weblogs vs. websites

Here’s the post where I first started to formulate these thoughts.

Here’s a piece on weblogs vs. websites which I bring up just for history. Yesterday I had a new visitor to my site who immediately emailed me…she gravitated towards the “standard” content vs the weblog content. I’ve been catering to the daily (or close to) reader for so long I’ve sort of forgotten that most people can’t handle the weblog. Too unorganized. Speaking of unorganized, these historical links are useless without a search function. These days it takes me a long time to find an important historical post I’m looking for. Add to the list of features that must be in place before a semi-public beta of SWM.

To my main purpose of this post: The main purpose of weblogs, IMHO, is a) hashing things out for myself and b) microContent consumption. The weblog allows me to start ideas I may never finish, further hash out ideas I just may finish (like this post), and as other people do the same thing, and I am able to consume that information in very small portions every day (or close to), their hashing-out interatively feeds back on my hashing-out, and our collective hashing-out improves, and, theoretically, so does the final product produced after all that hashing-out.

At the same time, some people inspire me to write less, more finished pieces, to use the blog more as a “proper” content publication device. And the idea behind SWM is that that is what it is, and it can just happen to also be used for blogging. And once I get my act together and can use it for that, you will see the “proper content” areas of the site (writing, photos, activism, intstallations, music) go up and be updated in such a manner.

But in the meantime I hash out the damn details here, and every so often it helps to come back and see where I was at on Feb ??, 2003. Most of the time, though, there is so much iterative feedback that I get stuck in a loop and don’t get to the “proper” production at all.

The main thing is, with this blog at least, is you are watching me learn.

Which makes me think about the month or so around when we move to Bosnia that I will not be updating or reading weblogs. There will be a month of meme that I will just miss out on. And that will be ok. But what effect will that have on the overall process? Will it help or hurt? Even once I get connected in BiH it will be much more limiting than my always-on broadband I have here in Virginia. Again, ? I think my productivity might go up. Then again, I think the whole thing would cycle anyway. People stop blogging and reading blogs all the time for different amounts of time. I am the same.