Saturday, January 29, 2005

Charlie Nesson asks about listening to podcasts in a car. 

David Jacobs: "The accelerating momentum towards overturning the death penalty should be a huge story." 

Fascinating audio report by a CNN reporter turned blogger. 

I turned off the aggregator for the BloJouCre conference. 

John Robb: "If we want to prevent the big vendors from using automated RSS subscription buttons as a customer acquisition vehicle, then we need a central repository." 

Ed Cone: "Is Greensboro's blog revolution over-hyped?" 

South African newspaper reports that the US warns American Rastas about Ethiopian drug laws. How did I find out? RSS, of course. 

Seven years ago, a story about capital punishment. 

Something I like, when a big company, who I want to support RSS, sends me questions regularly about RSS that not only tell me they understand it, but that they're pushing the limits, doing something cool, that maybe no one has done before. 

Another thing I like is that Google still shows their Scripting News Award on their awards page, even though they received it three years ago. 

Speaking of which, it's time once again to check my investment in Google board member, and Silicon Valley VC extrordinaire, John Doerr. Hey, we're doing pretty well, I have the number 3 hit. That could have been a "funding event" during the bubble!  

Guilt about categories 

AKMA writes about Technorati's tags.

I've seen the same thing. I have a very easy category routing system built-in to my blogging software. To route an item to a category, I just right-click and choose a category from a hierarchy of menus. I can't imagine that it could be easier. Yet I don't do it.

It's also very easy to add a new category, or to even reorganize my whole taxonomy. Never do those things either.

I have a theory that it's like desktop calendar software, which people were very excited about in 1985 or so (they called them Personal Information Managers or PIMs). Seemed like every new Mac software product had a calendar in it. John Sculley and Mitch Kapor were singing their praises. Users got all excited about them too, and set them up imagining how great it was going to be to finally have an orderly life. They happily entered appointments, until they spaced out or got lazy and didn't enter one. All it takes is one for the excitement to turn to guilt. You don't even want to look at the thing because you screwed up. Quickly you never use it. I've seen this happen both in my own work, and in others.

The category stuff works the same way. At first I delighted in the ease of routing stuff to categories. Eventually I would only route to one or two categories, and then I stopped altogether. Not because it wasn't easy enough, but because the guilt had taken over.

But what about grandma? 

NY Times: "If every parent in the world has a blog, then maybe it really will be about the child rather than the parent," Ms Waldman said. "Because at that point the child is the only one who's going to read it."

BigPub fallacy #1 about blogs -- the main thing about a blog is how many people read it.