Best of 2009, #7) Blog
That gem of a blog you can't believe you didn't know about until this year.
A sort of disappointing year in blogs, wasn't it? I've moved away from being obsessed with particular people to being obsessed with certain blog topics. Like blogs on cognitive behavioral psychology. Or blogs by authors of books I like to read. Or blogs about pregnancy or parenting. Or blogs about funny things. Or whatever people on Twitter are linking to. Nothing worth linking to, really.
Without explicitly opting in, I suppose I'm on that same "real-time web" train that everyone else is on. The evolution from blogroll to whatever-makes-it-past-my-bored-attention's-defenses bottom-up approach is a survival tactic more than anything else. I can't read everything. I'm like an agent that gets 3.8 million transcripts a day, forced to reject without reading all but a dozen, which either got forwarded by multiple people, or that a trusted friend walked in the door for me particularly.
I suppose neurons had a similar battle when they started organizing into a brain. Listen only for electrical impulses from a few select neurons, or let impulses come in from hundreds if not thousands of different neighboring and variously-trusted sources, and deal with the overall trend.
Is the Twitter stream a blog? Is Google Reader a blog? Is the Facebook newsfeed a blog? Cause that's what I'm reading more than anything else in 2009. Information overload to the max.
A sort of disappointing year in blogs, wasn't it? I've moved away from being obsessed with particular people to being obsessed with certain blog topics. Like blogs on cognitive behavioral psychology. Or blogs by authors of books I like to read. Or blogs about pregnancy or parenting. Or blogs about funny things. Or whatever people on Twitter are linking to. Nothing worth linking to, really.
Without explicitly opting in, I suppose I'm on that same "real-time web" train that everyone else is on. The evolution from blogroll to whatever-makes-it-past-my-bored-attention's-defenses bottom-up approach is a survival tactic more than anything else. I can't read everything. I'm like an agent that gets 3.8 million transcripts a day, forced to reject without reading all but a dozen, which either got forwarded by multiple people, or that a trusted friend walked in the door for me particularly.
I suppose neurons had a similar battle when they started organizing into a brain. Listen only for electrical impulses from a few select neurons, or let impulses come in from hundreds if not thousands of different neighboring and variously-trusted sources, and deal with the overall trend.
Is the Twitter stream a blog? Is Google Reader a blog? Is the Facebook newsfeed a blog? Cause that's what I'm reading more than anything else in 2009. Information overload to the max.