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Some recent changes around here

A bit of housecleaning, for my own reference more than anything:

I’ve upgraded this site to Movable Type 2.63, and made a few changes to the template, mostly reflected in the left and right sidebars.

On the left, I’ve added a “Recent Comments” listing, as well as a “Selected Musings — Via the Archives” section listing 10 articles written over the course of this site that I’m particularly happy with and that I don’t want to remain hidden in the archives. Both of these changes arise from some discussions I had last week with fellow bloggers at the Tokyo blogger’s party. On the right, I (finally!) updated the rotating images that are pulled from my (recently updated but still not current) Japan 2002 photo diary.

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Is a hyperexamined life worth living (or being marked-up)?

Adam Greenfield asked that question with some well-considered (and written) thoughts the other day about moblogging, inspired by meeting moblogger Mie Kennedy at the Tokyo Blogger’s party last week. Somehow Adam manages to be both euphoric and sobering in the same article:

Right now, Mie, alongside a few vanguard others like her, is tasting the first intoxicating moments of being able to live what is nothing other than an annotated life. All the early signs point to this helping those who so choose to live lives of almost unimaginably rich detail and texture by the standards of the ones who came before us – but I have to ask if we’ll ever come to believe that the hyperexamined life is one not worth living. As usual, perhaps, there are more questions than answers, and the only thing for it is to press ahead with open eyes and see where this wave deposits us.

Also in his piece is an echo of something I heard Adam tell me at the same shindig: “We are the first generation to have this ability to stop time and immediately semantically mark it up for later retrieval and cross-referencing […].” And earlier, this admonishment: “if the files are marked up properly!” I find myself worrying about this constantly now, every day that goes by I feel a slight anxious pull that I haven’t yet attended to this, nor even begun the research. Perhaps it’s an anxiety brought on in part by coming life, and the soon dawning of this entity’s own (his/her)story, and how that story will exist for the most part in the floating land of bytes and pixels and deteriorating storage media, to say nothing of the tangled protocols and conflicting standards. I want the story, the life, to be grounded, bodily, corporeal, yet the tools with which to document and record, let alone to retrieve and cross-reference, that story are day by day increasingly becoming ephemeral, and immaterial. Immaterial in the “having no material body or form” (American Heritage) sense of the word. But can the “of no importance or relevance; inconsequential or irrelevant” sense be far behind?

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Recently updated, and watching paint dry

Everytime I add a new article to this site, my site gets listed on Movable Type’s homepage in their “Recently Updated” sidebar. It’s one of the benefits of paying the one-time $20 “donor” fee for using their software. (Mind you, the software has been benefit enough and then some). I never go over there and check to see my site listed, but I usually get one or two visitors from MT’s home page so I know it works. But tonight, out of curiousity, I thought I would follow my site link and see how long it managed to stay up on the list of 15 recently updated blogs before it fell off the bottom.

The results: after my recent post on “More Japan-based Sites…”, this site managed to stay up on the list for 11 whole minutes. Now I have no idea how many visitors MT’s site got in that period, nor do I care very much, but it would be interesting to do some calculations on the data (perhaps). I do know that when I started the watch, it was 3:50 in the morning of February 27th, here in Tokyo (yeah, yeah, I’m going to bed in a minute, just let me finish this). At that time, it was 10:50am (on February 26th) in San Francisco (where presumably MT’s servers are located), and 1:50pm in New York. I would hazard that this would be a relatively slow period for posts, though what do I know. (It certainly wasn’t slow for Instapundit, during my brief 11 minutes of fame he popped up twice, the bastard!)

Last May, before I even started this site, I read a post on Mike.Whybark.com about a similar experiment he did, and I pulled it up just now. A good 9 months ago, after Mike updated his blog, his site remained up on MT’s “Recently Updated” list for a good 35 minutes. Leaving aside a myriad of factors, it’s fanciful but fun anyway to extrapolate that in 9 months time, the blogs in the MT “stable” have increased over 200%, or at least their “posting power” has. Of course, this is all “inside baseball” in the extreme, and therefore this nonsensical post will come to an end, and I will trudge off to bed.

(Okay, that’s enough articles about blogging I think. I promise to return to regularly scheduled programming post haste).