Wednesday, July 27, 2011

A laundry list of observations about blogs

The following have been building up over some time.

  • If you read blogs but wouldn’t want to write one, you may still want to consider making a “passive” blog that contains the ones you read, since it’s great to automatically get a list of them ranked by how recently they were last posted to.

  • If you want to kill yourself and make it look like you are still alive, simply write up a few blog posts and use the “post options” to cause them to be published at whatever times you like in the future, that way you continue to blog from beyond the grave.

  • The great thing about blogs, in contrast with Facebook, Google+ etc is the simplicity of the contract between writer and reader: anyone can read your stuff without having to sign up in any sense. There are no nasty surprises in privacy settings. It’s true that Google+ allows you to declare some of your ramblings to be public, but that’s not the same somehow.

  • Putting together a blog post is quite a satisfying work of craftmanship1; I couldn’t get the same feel from using Twitter, although I see there may be an interesting challenge to packing some observation into 140 characters.

  • Studying one’s pageview statistics can get rather addictive if you’re not careful. Blogger lets you pull up very detailed charts showing pageview history, which web sites, countries etc produced the pageviews, etc.

  • When I set up my Google+ account, it integrated in my picasaweb photos, which turns out to mean the pictures that I have in the past used to illustrate blog posts. Along with other stuff I had forgotten about (like some stuff on Google docs), all of which I found a bit spooky.



1this post being something of an exception

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