blogs

Paul Graham has an interesting perspective on a reason why bloggers may like to blog:

I think what most bloggers are doing is thinking out loud. It's a little misleading to talk of "putting things into words," because that implies the ideas come first. In fact, expressing thoughts creates them. And especially expressing thoughts to other people, even people you don't know. So I think the reason many people like blogging is that they like the thinking it causes.

Paul Graham: What Drives Bloggers?

I thought this was really smart and changed how I view statistics. From Tim Bray:

There’s a word for companies that base all decisions on ruthless quantitative ROI metrics: Bankrupt. I’m an engineer and value numbers, but in business, sometimes anecdotal evidence is all you’ve got, and the anecdotal evidence that blogging produces good results for some companies is pretty voluminous.

This is fascinating and fun.

Robert Scoble:

When I linked to the “best blonde joke ever” I never expected it to become one of the biggest traffic generators I’d ever seen. Yesterday alone 4,713 people visited here because of the joke and the traffic hasn’t seemed to go down.

Here's the best blonde joke ever.

Recently I started submitting some news stories I thought were cool from www.govtech.net to Digg.com. I'm having a lot of fun with Digg.

A cool thing just happened. I was looking at the Portable Wi-Fi Phone Launched story on Govtech that I posted the other day and I decided that that would be a good story to submit to Digg. So I went in to submit it and guess what, somebody else had already submitted that story from Govtech.net. Sweet.

Alice Marshall, from the Global PR Blog Week 2.0 online conference quoted me about blogs:

Working for e.Republic and publishing the Nick Mudge's Technology and Government Weblog, Mudge sees the blogging phenomena from both sides of the fence. Mudge said,

"Today I read blogs for news everyday. They've become a large part of my news gathering. Since the blogs I read almost always link to the source of their news and information, I've found them very reliable. I've come to know and trust many of them. Some of the blogs that I have found are part of the same niche as the news I provide. These ones have sometimes worked like inadvertent external news researchers for the news that I'm looking for, which has been valuable.

To some degree I gauge how good a story is by whether or not a blogger picks it up and writes about it. I'm always delighted to see one of Govtech's stories picked up and written about."

I'm on top of the fence looking at the blogosphere on one side and traditional journalism on the other. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. The combination of both is what I see is best.

Since my last post on this blog I've really been thinking about serendipity a lot. Serendipity is the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident. You can't automate serendipity, but you can automate or manufacture the conditions of which serendipity is more likely to occur. Man that is awesome.

I think serendipity really is a faculty, an ability. I don't think it is just luck. I think serendipity is something that you can work on and improve.

I'm surrounding myself in serendipity. I use delicious to keep track of all my web thoughts (a webpage is a web thought to me, and my delicious is my web mind), and sometimes through delicious I explore other's web thoughts, which have some similarity to mine. Delicous helps me browse the web fast. When I find something of possible use I can delicous it right away and move on with certainty that I will always be able to find the thing again. I've got my web research resources on the web, which are the blogs and websites that I go to regularly to look for news. I've got my communication lines with the people that I work with. I've got statistics to track what is getting good hits and where hits are comming from and what websites are linking to what stories. Of course there are the search engines and various programs on the internet which I use that shuffle information around, trying to seep it through in useful ways.

All these things create serendipity for future news and information. And also the news that I put out create serendipity in themselves. People email me with stories, people link to the stories. I notice links to the stories and trace them back to new resources from which I can find new news.

I think speed has a lot to do with serendipity. How fast can you analyse information? How fast can you post a story? How fast can you browse the web? If you can travel and grok 50 webpages in an hour, serendipity is much more likely than just 10.

What really interests me about serendipity is this question: How do you find the information that you would be looking for if you knew to look for it?

One way to do that is to get the information to find you. This is one of the reasons I've started this blog here. I'm not looking for a very big audience with this. This is about my technology and content interests and I want to use it to find and establish relationships with other people who bring me the information that I need. And I'd very much enjoy providing the same benefit to others. This is a fascinating angle of why to blog. Why to blog? Because you can use it to get the best and very valuable information in what you are trying to do.

Sam Ruby says why he blogs:

"So why do I blog? Because it works. It finds worthwhile things for me to read. It helps me refine and focus my thoughts and be more productive too. And most of all, creates the opportunity to interact with more interesting people. That's what's in it for me."