Where am I?, Blog Creep, and FriendFeed

So, as a statement of philosophy, this blog has generally been used as an exercise in writing, and it really follows for the Gregg Easterbrook blog model than the more common and typical modern version in which blogs are for just spewing out whatever half-formed thoughts that come to you, under the pretense that more is better. So most of my entries there are actually reasonably planned and well thought-out entries, more akin to a small less-polished magazine article than to a typical blog-post.

Of course, practitioners of the "spew" style are typically people who dedicate many hours of their day to blogging, and because of their effort actually create a narrative through their many entries. So I'm not completely dissing that style of blog, I'm just saying, I can't and don't do that.

But this blog has also been a means for me to tell people where I am and what I'm doing, which since I travel for a living and like traveling when I'm not making a living is a pretty difficult question to answer. So I've started a new blog to provide short updates on where I am and what I'm doing for people who care or want to get a hold of me. I know that the rage for this sort of communication is now twitter, but I'm just not ADD enough to have much interest in that. To me its far too "micro" to be useful, and there is no way in hell I'm updating it with where I am 15 times a day. Plus I'd like to include photos and short travelogue entries and such. So that's what the new blog is. I expect to update it much more often, as it will be composed mainly of short (for me) entries about where I'm at, what is happening there, and what I'm doing. As well, hopefully some travelogue type stuff, and flickr photo's from different places.

And I can hear you saying, dear reader, "Another blog? Jesus, I barely have time to keep up with the rest of this Interweb crap!" and I understand and sympathize. Which is why I'm telling you about some options. First off, if anyone out there isn't using Google Reader, you should start. I tried to keep up with dozens of blogs, and it took forever and inevitably I'd forget about one of them and then be 45 entries behind 5 months later and just give up. Google reader is a free web program for gathering RSS bookmarks. If you don't know what that means, have no fear, as it stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and they mean it. In fact, if you're using Mozilla Firefox for your web browser (and really there is absolutely no reason you shouldn't be) all you have to do is click on the little orange box in the address bar on any site you want to read, and it will ask you where to add it to, and you can choose Google Reader from the list. I'm sure there's a way to do it with IE that isn't much harder, but you need to stop using it, so I won't tell you. Once you've got all the feeds you want, you just go to the page and there they all are. This means, that if you've got a friend with a blog who posts to it particularly sporadically (in olden days I'd have used myself as this example, but Princess Blogonoke has earned this distinction for all time) you don't have to go to the blog, you can just check Google reader and it will let you know when there's something new on *any* of the blogs or news feeds you follow. Add to that the social aspect of sharing stories you find interesting with any of your friends who are also using Reader and it completely changes the way you enjoy blogs, and allows you to use your friends as a filter for the most interesting stuff out there.

I first learned about Reader from Lenny. Even though I'm a fairly savvy computer user I do tend to get stuck into my habits and don't look around too much until I get really fed up. But I immediately fell in love with Reader and I think anyone else who uses it will too.

However, in my slate reading today (using Google reader) I saw an article on a (somewhat) new website started by former Googleers called FriendFeed that makes this process even easier. Using it you can create a page for yourself that pulls together information from the dozens of social-networking sites on the web and collects all your info together for others to access all at once. This greatly eases the burden on anyone trying to keep up with you and reduces the list of sites they need to visit drastically. There are still some sites not supported (MySpace is a big one) but it is a much easier method.

However, that's only half of the story, the real important take away is that you can also create pages for people, even if they are too damn lazy to do it themselves (like Andy). This is the "Imaginary" Friend option, but it doesn't just have to be for cyberstalking the latest from Cory Doctorow, it can actually be used on your friends and the public data they have listed. So anyway, I'm on there as ktismael (no surprise) and by going there you can keep up with all of this stuff. Of course, once I got on there was only one person in my whole gmail address book who was already there: Lenny. So I suppose I could have just asked him 6 months ago and he'd have told me. But then I was in his house 6 months ago, so maybe I'm not too far behind.

I'm currently still using Reader primarily, and probably will always use both together. But its a pretty cool service. Anyway, using one or both of these sites will hopefully make this much easier and allow you to forgive me for bringing one more blog to the planet.