Metablogging
Back in November, I built decafbad recaffeinated using Tinderbox. Through it, I wanted to finally get my head around playing with the web publishing features of Tinderbox — and I hoped that after the Yak Shaving, I would enjoy the results enough to be motivated to continue pushing out small particles of thought. That worked for awhile. Thanks to my serial enthusiasm, though, the shine wore off after a month or two and my output has since dwindled. The interface is pretty cool, but there are just enough clunky bits to make me think twice about starting up the app.
In December, I built 0xDECAFBAD accumulator in an attempt to automatically capture and accumulate in one spot all the stuff I leave behind on 15 services or so across the net. A month later, it's still running. It's filled with crap day after day. It's all my crap, and I'm glad to have my crap all in one pile, but it's very noisy.
Between recaffeination and accumulation, I think I'm bracketing the same issues. On one side, I've got John Henry hammering down the microcontent spikes, and on the other I've got the machine cronjobbing away. What I really want is something a bit in between: Maybe a crap pile for myself and an easy manual selection method that I'll remember to use habitually for editorial control. It's all really just attempts to try to reconstitute the diffuse spew that used to be more or less concentrated into one spot.
Twitter sucked the blogging out of Molly, but I was already well down that path long before I think Twitter was a glimmer in Obvious eyes.
Apropos of that, here I am back at my traditional blog. The blog where I've been hoping to get myself writing again. Maybe I'll swing back this way and not make this the last post for another few months. I've certainly got lots in my head, and there's certainly been lots going on worth thinking about out loud — but I've also got plenty I shouldn't or couldn't actually babble about in mixed company.
So, what to expect from me, then? Eh, who knows. This might be the last post here for another few months.
Archived Comments
I found that Twitter helped me get back in touch with my personal voice that had gotten lost from spending too much time reading the echo chamber. Which is probably why I've been over blogging lately after taking most of a year off :)
Hmmm...good call on the personal voice aspect, Kellan. I find that I can be "freer" posting to Jaiku / Facebook status because it has less eyes (closer eyes?) on it than the broad distribution of my main site.
And the accumulator looks like, well, er, a Jaiku clone :P Many people have told me that they like the fact that Jaiku gives my delicious bookmarks a place where they can comment on my observations of that link...I like that. Although, like you, I figure I should probably suck those back into my main site.
My blog URL is in the signature of every e-mail, which means that I want the front page to always have something thoughtful. So I added a checkbox to determine whether a post could appear there. I realized later that this was also perfect criteria for whether the article was signal or noise, so now I have feeds for "front page stories" (non-crap) and "everything" and I think it works out quite well.
I found that building an accumulator sorta killed my blogging desire as well... as in "well, I listened to a song on Last.fm so now I don't have to blog tonight." I think the accumulator is going to have to become a secondary page to my blog to get me practicing my writing again.
Yeah... that's the other thing I've been thinking - I wonder if I'm not really ever going to get back to blogging, and will end up doing something else. I want to keep writing and I want to keep hacking — blogging seems social enough to keep me from becoming a complete hermit. Hmm.
@Boris: I can't say that my accumulator wasn't inspired by Jaiku at all - but the main difference is that this one is mine :) The issue of comments in context is on my mind, though - I've considered hooking haloscan or something up to the accumulator, though that would then be another divergent stream of comments (assuming anyone participated) from all the original items. Hmm.
@Tom: That's another thing I'm thinking about. My home page is a cruddy redirect to the accumulator now. I should make it a more focused summary page, maybe have one or more "featured" items along with "about me" info.
@Micah: Yup, that's where I'm at too. :/ Outsourced my "I listened to X" to last.fm — done.
It's interesting... I see a lot of people confronting exactly this. I think having stuff like the Action Streams to capture my delicious/twitter/etc. activity has freed me up to do more writing, not least because I want to show up on everybody else's aggregations. :)