Internet Commentator

Blame bloglines

My blog-block presented something of a conundrum to me: I was wasting spending just as much time reading blogs as ever, and yet couldn't get it together to write any. It occurred to me that while blogging had been declining in frequency for a while now, it more or less fell off the precipice around the time I decided to read my favourite blogs via bloglines. I had thought that by keeping up to date with the most recent posts, it would save all the laborious clicking through to each site to see if there had been any new posts, freeing up time to do actual paying work, and perhaps the odd blog post. But, by keeping up with only the most recent posts, I had missed out on many subsequent comments discussions, and some of the earlier posts had slipped my mind, whereas when I checked each blog "manually", those earlier posts might have inspired a thought or two the second time around.

I've arrived!

Now that I've got a new watch: Internet Commentator Commentated.

Busted!

If there's one thing more pathetic than setting up your own watch blog to parse and pore over every entry by your pet blog noire too, it's setting up your own watch blog to parse and pore over every entry by your pet blog noire and astro-turfing it with sock-puppets. And if there's one thing even more pathetic than that it's accidentally outing one of your sock-puppet identities in the course of a discussion at another blog!

More Bellum

I'm delighted to see that Joe Miller, a regular and insightful commenter at Catallarchy has set up his own blog: Bellum et Mores.

It's been quiet... too quiet

So, I've been busy over the weekend on my side blog, Frank's mixes. I had thought I would just upload one mix over the weekend but I have five mixes uploaded already, replete with cover images (for cd cases or ipods) and tracklistings. And I've notified a few forums of its existence. I think I'll have a go at harnessing this free-floating motivation for the "day-blog" (as well as the day-job!) and try and get Internet Commentator back on track over the next few days.

Tinkerings..

Ok, it's very much in pre-beta mode, and I haven't really done anything with the template yet, but I'm starting a new music-themed blog here. Actually, it's less of a blog and more of a place to host some of my mix mp3s, as I explain in the solitary post so far, but I'll use the opportunity to road-test Wordpress and see if it might suit for Internetcommentator.com in the future.

UPDATE: By the way, I do realise that the majority of my regular readers probably don't share my musical taste. But, I would appreciate it if you would point anyone you know who might be interested towards the new blog. I'm just trying to get the word out at the moment.

Utility/futility

Kip Esquire wonders what is the point of Open Source Media Pajamas Media:

As I understand it, the purpose of Pajamas Media is to bring together the bloggers that everyone already knows about so that people will, um, know about them.

Think about that.

What exactly does Pajamas Media accomplish that my aggregator, or Google, doesn't? I can tell you what my aggregator accomplishes that Pajamas Media doesn't. My aggregator lets me add or subtract bloggers that I do or do not find interesting. My aggregator lets me save clippings from blogs so I can read them later. My aggregator lets me easily filter through what topics I consider important or unimportant, rather than being told by some "compilation staff" what I should be reading (all the news that's fit to print, provided it comes from "important bloggers" and makes it past Pajama Media's "compilation staff" — yes, a vast improvement over the MSM).

And my aggregator lets me do this for free and without ads (unless the blogs themselves insert the ads into their RSS feeds — a filthy habit, incidentally).

So I ask again: how exactly does Pajamas Media create utility rather than destroy it? What does it provide that adds to, rather than detracts from, the blogreading experience?

The consensus seems to agree with me (one example here). The death of Pajamas Media looks like a question not of if, but when.

As soon as they burn their way through the $3.5m funding they somehow managed to blag I reckon

[via Catallarchy]

See also Jim Lowney's very amusing description of OSM's launch party.

Gone Fishin'

Well, not quite. Off to Blighty for a week so no posts from me until at least Monday 7th. But maybe Neil might throw a few words together between now and then (hint, hint).

20 Grand ain't too shabby

Forget about Blog Shares: The Business Opportunities weblog has a little applet which calculates your blog's worth based on the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal:

My blog is worth $20,323.44.
How much is your blog worth?

"Wondrous Opinions"...

...Apparently. I'm the featured interviewee for Disillusioned Lefty's Irish blogger interview this week.