Thursday, October 31, 2002

I Should Have Been Clearer Dan Shafer: "A single outline blog of an entire baseball game gets unwieldy." Not true. This is where outliners shine. A large outline is no more difficult to work with than a small one. [Scripting News] What I meant, Dave, was that trying to read the entire game's set of notes in one outline could get unwieldy for the reader. Opening all the nodes (presuming one for each half-inning, for example) can confuse people who don't grok outlines and how to use them. 7:54:00 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Real-Time Blogging Issues. Daniel Berlinger, author of the Web editing tool called Archipelago, was one of the folks who joined in the recent experiment in real-time blogging of the World Series that Dave Winer and Jake and a couple of others of us launched. He said me in an email this morning: Tools seem to affect the result of rt blogging far more than in other cases. I'm curious to know if you have features that you feel would make rt blogging easier, or is it just a slightly faster version of regular blogging? I have a sort of intuitive feeling that a real-time outliner is probably a better environment for rt blogging than the usual write-edit-post-wait cycle. I'd like the idea, I think, of having an outline open that would just grow during the course of the event. that also lets me define some comments to be less interesting or relevant than others by nesting them deeper and hiding them by default, for example. OTOH, a single outline blog of an entire baseball game gets unwieldy. It occurred to me as I thought about this that what I'd really like is a rt blogging tool that captured my notes and published them in real time (even fairly automatically, like readers looking over my shoulder). It should then easily allow me, at the conclusion of the game or event, to archive the whole thing and then create a sort of highlights/summary post in correct chronological order to post on my main blog. Or something like that. 3:08:36 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Blogging: 30 Days Later. I just realized I've been blogging daily (with two exceptions) for a full month now. New patterns and habits have emerged. I've made a bunch of new friends. I've had tons of new ideas and insights. And I haven't updated my "main" Web page one time during this period. I didn't believe anything would replace my desire to maintain my personal site, but blogging has. The instant gratification, the speed (even when things run slow) of updating, has made me much more inclined to add multiple posts and stories to the blog every day. This has the feel in many ways of the glory days of my youth as a daily newspaper reporter/editor/columnist, only faster. When Radio first came out, I called it the "Web's typewriter." It's that, but it's so much more. Blogging has done more to change me in a short period of time than anything since my first encounter with the Web. Thanks, Dave and UserLand guys! There's nothing but fun and speed bumps ahead! 1:33:06 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

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