Category: Vanity Publishing

Stuart Mudie of Blethers.com was nice enough to write me and let me know that my moblog had made an appearance over at Smart Mobs, the site about “mobile communication, pervasive computing, wireless networks, [and] collective action” that accompanies the book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, by Howard Rheingold.

As you can see from the above screen grab, Kaika also made it up on the site. I called Naoko over to the computer to show her, and after explaining a bit about the site and who Howard was, she remarked, “boy, Kaika-kun is already becoming famous.” (Hmmn, I can see a headline: “5 WEEK OLD TYKE IN TOKYO ‘MOBBED’ BY FANS AFTER GETTING SMARTMOBBED”. Do they make shades for 5-week olds?)

The mention was occassioned by something Stuart had written a month and a half ago that I stumbled upon while compiling a list of “what is moblogging” article links for the moblog:

It won’t be long before new fathers, instead of handing out cigars, send pictures of their new-born children live to their moblogs from the birthing room. This is also news, of a kind – news that is of interest to a restricted group of people, admittedly, but worthy of record nonetheless.

I wish I had read this when he had published it, it would have hastened the purchase of the new phone, and indeed it would have been great to have moblogged pictures from the hospital.

Recently having become a more avid user of RSS feeds to keep up not only with my favorite blogs — at least those that have RSS feeds — but also with current events, it seemed like a good time to update my feeds and the images I use to display them. With respect to the feeds, I changed my RSS 0.91 feed to an RSS 2.0 feed, which includes the entire text of each post. (The RSS 1.0 feed, which includes excerpts of each post, I have left as-is).

If the above makes no sense to you, this article is a good place to start. This Mark Pilgrim article might also help (stick to page 1). If you’re interested in reading feeds via a news reader (or “aggregator”), this list by Haiko Hebig has links to a bunch of different options (for the record, I’m using NewzCrawler).

I’ve gone back and forth about news feeds and whether or not this is how I want to read the sites that I like to read. However, recently, as time for blog-reading (not to mention blog-writing) has decreased substantially, I’ve found that by using a news reader, I can keep up with the sites I’m interested in much more efficiently. There was recently an interesting exchange of comments at Ken Loo’s World about people who use news readers possibly being “skimmers.” Naturally the RSS reader allows me to “skim” at a quicker pace, but I wouldn’t agree with the implied notion that somehow I’m affording myself a less-qualitative reading experience, or that somehow RSS is better-suited for link-and-run sites like Instapundit. The fact of the matter is that regardless of whether I’m viewing sites via an RSS reader or my web browser, I do a lot of skimming. The RSS feeds simply allow my to skim faster, so that when I come across those articles that I deem are worth reading, I actually have more time to linger and ponder and reflect, and sometimes comment.

Back to house-cleaning, I also added .gif buttons denoting these feeds, which are variations on buttons created by Jeremy Hedley of Antipixel. A while back Jeremy implored his readers to “steal his buttons,” and I’ve more or less done that, changing them slightly. Thanks Jeremy!

It will probably be a bit quieter around here than it recently has been, as I have a freelance gig starting today which will last for a week. I might sneak in a post or two if I’ve got time, but then again I might not. We’ll have to see how it goes. The gig itself isn’t your usual freelance assignment, so hopefully it’ll give me some fodder with which to entertain you later….