doing, and not doing, stuff online

All things Bru has an interesting post about blogging, and doing stuff online:

I recognize several different levels of commitment and matching satisfaction: chatting (almost no trace is left of what you're saying, the conversation is limited to synchronous consumption) , newsreading, (social) bookmarking (that is posting reference of an interesting article on a site like del.icio.us or spurl), reblogging (that's the practice of taking an article and republishing it, usually adding a small personal comment), commenting (when actually building on a conversation through personal ideas and opinions), “self-centered” blogging (as in this post), cross-reference blogging (when a post is part of a wider conversation, with references, new ideas, refactoring and so on).

It's something I've been thinking about - mainly because I spend so much time reading stuff online while I'm at work, but don't feel that I can concentrate enough to synthesize what I'm reading and put it into a blog post. So I end up, if I'm disciplined, with a whole lot of notes, and sometimes bookmarks at del.icio.us, and never come back to write through and post what I've been looking at.

flickr and yahoo!

flickr has been acquired / bought / snapped up by Yahoo!

The announcement from flickr indicated that things will not change, but I have a heavy feeling in my stomach about this, which interestingly I didn't have when Blogger announced it was being taken over by Google. I think this is because Yahoo! has, to my eyes, a messy and unattractive site with way too much on it, whereas Google is always neat and clean with the minimum of extra guff.

I hope that Yahoo! doesn't pick apart flickr and incorporate it into what they've already got. Apart from the great photo sharing thing going at flickr is the great idea sharing that goes on, and I love logging in and finding tweaks to the application put in place both by the makers of flickr, and the users.

moral weight

I keep finding interesting, or quirky, sentences in things I'm reading eg:

One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear.
from Paul Graham How to Start a Startup

It's an intriguing concept "moral weight", what do I reckon it is? Responsibility? Doing the right thing? Is that so hard? I reckon the heavy thing is doing it all yourself, making the decisions, having to fill in all your own gaps.

tags dymo grafitti pleasure

Irritating
Originally uploaded by Edwinek.

To start with when I looked at this picture I thought it was Dymo tape, you know that stuff, blue plastic tape that went into a labelling machine with a dial-up letterer - very cool - my Mum wouldn't buy one. She did neat hand lettered labels instead. Boring. I wanted to dial-up the letters one by one and punch them out, then peel off the tape from its backing paper and stick it onto something.

When I lived in Adelaide Cass came around one day with a Dymo machine and we tagged the dog. (My previous whippet Eddie.) We put the word "dog" on her head then took her for a walk, we had a whole story worked out to tell people if they stopped us and asked "why does your dog have the word "dog" on its head?". We were going to say "it's a reminder" - a bit like in a thousand years of solitude where the town can't get to sleep and starts to forget what everything is, so they label things, but then they began to forget the meaning of the labels.

Tags are a bit like that.

I forgot to mention that I found the picture via the Flickr Postcard Browser. Nice.

includes Tasmania

I'm looking at The Photobloggies. It's an award / prize / competition / thingummy to determine the best photoblogs around the world. It's divided up geographically. Somewhat bizarrely the organisers have felt the need to confirm that yes Tasmania is included in Australia, along with the new country "Zew Zealand":

"Best photoblog from the countries of Australia and Zew Zealand. Includes Tasmania.

I know who I'll be nominating!

instiki etc

Oh my goodness - I haven't blogged for 13 whole days - this is not the way to become a better blogger!
so,
what have I been doing?

In the last couple of days I've been playing with Instiki - it's a very easy to download and use wiki. I've put it on to my home computer and I've been playing around with it . . . using it to make notes about all my different projects, and the trip, and my daily writing, etc, so on, and so forth.

What else? I finished the Monkey Baa website, and I've finished the site for Workshop 1, but that's got some problems that I need to resolve.

And I've been negotiating with Adam and Brian about where we're going to meet up in Spain, and we've finally settled on Madrid! Of course. Yay team!