This website has recently been gutted, cleaned, and redesigned, and there are some significant changes to highlight. Before, articles, links and other materials were kept in one “weblog” (in Expression Engine terms) and targeted by using different categories. That has now changed, each content type is kept within it’s own “weblog”, and is pulled together in one stream of thought. Links are now driven by my delicious bookmarks, and I’m also pulling in my twitter status updates. There has been some-ado on the internet about aggregation. There’s facebook and friendfeed that tell others everything that you might be doing at any given point. I figured I could do one better by pulling the data that would fill the timelines of those other sites into my own, personal, space. This is made incredibly easy thanks to the flexible Expression Engine and the FeedGrab plugin. The result is a stream of my public thoughts—making a special note of the term “public”.
Sites like Twitter and Delicious, etc. open an even larger door to publicness, and it is easy, I find, to over-share. I will save us both a bit of embarrassment by keeping some thoughts to myself. I’d like to think I’m practicing restraint by only offering for public consumption that which I think worth ingesting. This follows a mantra recently submitted by Merlin Mann. I have a theory about publishing materials on the internet, and this goes for twitters and blog comments as well—do not post something that your mother would find questionable. I see a lot of vitriol in blog comments, and I think to myself “what would your mother say if she knew you said that?” Call it prudish behavior, I see it as a test to make sure you only publish thoughtful material. The web is the most powerful communication platform that the world has seen. It severely reduces the barriers of entry to publish material. The least we can do is avoid the obvious “FAIL”, and really work to make what we publish smarter, sharper, better.
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