Category Archives: blogging

Skimming the web

The way I see it, there are three stages to web browsing:

  1. The web is new. You visit the blogs of friends and colleagues every day. You use Gmail or Yahoo mail and check in on your favourite sites a few times a day.
  2. It quickly becomes tiring visiting websites every day that may not have any new content. You discover feed readers and play around with a few of them. You find that Google Reader is a pretty good one and you start subscribing to every single interesting blog or feed you find.
  3. Not long after you suffer feed fatigue. There are just too many blogs. Too much noise, too much chaff. You discover Stumbleupon, Friend Feed and Twitter (I’m ‘donncha’ on each of those if you’d like to subscribe/follow!). Now the feeds or sites you read are recommended by your trusted circle of friends. You’ll still dig into your feed reader but it seems to happen less and less and that unread items count keeps going up and up.

Now if only I had time to check out Friend Feed properly. I find I’m skimming through the web these days. If I can’t scan a blog post and understand the main points of the page within a few seconds I’m gone. It’s a sad state of affairs.

If you’re time poor, how have your web surfing habits changed? (paradoxically, if you have time to comment here, you’re not that time poor. What a bind!)

My favourite Irish bloggers

For the last few months I’ve added a link to one of my favourite Irish bloggers to my sidebar. If your eyes wander over there now you’ll see Green Ink, Riemann’s Cut, and this month’s blog, Inside View by Bernie Goldbach.

All eyes are on the Irish Web Awards (this weekend!), Irish Blog Awards and the “Blog Post of the Month”, but why not show your appreciation for the great blogs you read by highlighting them? Have your own “Blogger of the Month”!

The blogs I add to that list are those blogs that no matter how much they post, I’ll always try to read every post because they’re entertaining or informative. Thanks guys (and gals in the future)!

Do you read any Irish blogs?

If you’re not Irish or living in Ireland, can you name an Irish blogger that you read on a regular basis? (Besides me of course!) And more importantly, why? Is it because of their niche, or is it their witty and insightful commentary?

I ask this because Kathy Foley blasted Irish blogger Twenty Major’s new book and proceeded to question whether the Irish blogosphere had anything to offer the world. Has the land of saints and scholars become a land of consumers without giving anything worthwhile back?

I haven’t read Twenty’s book so I can’t comment on that but I do not agree with her assertions regarding the Irish blogosphere. If you’d like to find out for yourself, here’s an easy way to immerse yourself:

Happy reading!

On Tuesday I join the Bebo Generation at BlogTalk

Sigh. The local free newspaper, The Cork Independent, covered BlogTalk 2008 here in Cork and lead with the headline, “Bebo Generation descend on Cork”. Bebo? *mutter* *mutter*

Anyway, I’ll be sitting on a panel titled, From blog-style commentary to conversational social media which pretty much spans the entire blogging and social media experiences. On the panel with me will be Stephanie Booth who I have conversed with a few times on IRC but never met, Bernie Goldbach who I have met a number of times and always has something interesting to say, and finally, Jan Schmidt who I had never heard of but his bio suggests someone who will know a lot about the topic of social media!

How do I feel about the current crop of social media sites? I quit Facebook! Well, no I didn’t, but I will, soon!

Everything is stupid

Some guy called John Waters says bloggers are stupid and can’t string two words together. Now, we all know that’s a bare faced lie, but maybe he had been trawling Bebo when he came up with that freakish idea?

I missed the radio interview where he said that and frankly I couldn’t care less. I only picked up on it when Irish bloggers went gaga over it. I did get a kick out of John’s new blog though. That’s funny. Thanks Niall.

John Waters

Blogs in Plain English

What’s the big deal about blogs? Haydn rang me this morning because he’s doing research on blogs and I remembered Joseph mentioned this video on IRC. This is a reminder from the Common Craft folk that not everyone knows what a blog is, or why they’re a great communication tool.

If you’re reading this and thinking about setting up your own website, watch this short three minute video and you may well decide to start a blog. Nice to see WordPress.com get a mention too!

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Oh dear. How many times have I clicked submit on a Typepad blog comment form and moved on to the next site only to accidentally come back hours later and discover the CAPTCHA waiting for me?

I don’t think I’ve lost a comment yet, but they could have put the CAPTCHA on the same page as the comment form. If that’s impossible, the comment form should warn the visitor that a second page needs to be filled out. It’s not rocket science.

The most prolific commentators of June 2007

Short and sweet, the people who left the most comments on my blog in June 2007 are:

  1. Robert
  2. Dankoozy
  3. David Precious

Thank you guys for participating!

It doesn’t take much to get to the top of that list, but I will delete or ignore comments from people who I feel are just taking the mickey and leaving one or two word comments!

Why blogs are better #368

How else could I get on to Google Finance’s page on MSFT? It might be gone by the time you check it, but click the thumbnail for a screen capture. My boss at Tradesignals.com would have given his right arm for exposure like that!

Did I get many hits from there? Only 9 so far, but it was pretty cool to see that url pop up in my referrer stats!

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