Feed Subscriptions
Rolling Links
- Open Code Blog - New York Times A blog about open source technology at The New York Times, written by and primarily for developers.
- Postgenomic Postgenomic collects posts from hundreds of science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data.
- Flowing Data Exploring all things data!
- The Media Laboratory, MIT
- Cartoons on the backs of business cards.
I’m trying to get better at this blogging thing. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. I need to stop thinking “just post something, you can write real things later on”. On his blog Brent Fitzgerald recently asked why it seemed like John Maeda was the only Media Lab faculty consistently blogging (actually multi-blogging). I think this somehow ties into my difficulty with blogging. Sure there is all the usual putting yourself out there, writing is hard, thinking is harder, etc. but the real truth is that I feel a little guilty about writing a good blog article. I say guilty because I could have written something good for something else instead. A journal, a conference, even a magazine. Instead I wrote it for a blog. This is a bad mentality because it:
- neglects the impact of blogs - blogs are important and it is
- dismissive of the portability of medium - blog work can be compiled and shared in other forms.
The blogs that I read are important and the articles clearly have impact (more impact than journal articles in some cases). I’ve been sitting looking at my news reader and thinking about the good blogs. See, there’s a variety of different content I read, but there are also a variety of different mentalities I have for each of them. There are some blogs that are just there. I mean, really I should take them out but sometimes I like to skim through them to see what’s going on in the field. Most of the flash blogs I read (which arrive pre-aggregators) fall into this camp. I don’t really care about the content, I care about the trends. There are also blogs that were once good, but have fallen by the wayside. I keep them around in the hope that they might one day aspire to what they once were (tuaw, I’m looking at you.) Other blogs, like svn, maeda’s stuff, and leo’s hyperexperience are truly motivating. They somehow manage to write about the content I want to read and present it in the way that I want to read it. I’m hoping that I’ll be inspired to write good articles because these blogs already do that. Just as they are doing unto me, I should do unto others as well. I’m not sure if this whole golden rule thing really works, but I’d like to try and fine out.
I’m also going to make an effort to link, include images, and proofread. This was my groundhog’s day resolution, I’m just a little late getting around to it.