Bookmarks
Links
How many links constitute a valid blog entry? Is there a standard for this sort of thing? Does it help if there are insightful comments like "Hey, this is cool, check it out"?
Well, I'm going to clean out my bookmarks, and I invite you to come along for the ride. Some of these are probably pretty old, but you may have missed them the first time around. I'll do it all in a single blog. Hope you find something you like.
404
Quite a few of the links are dead. I wonder what the average lifespan of a URL is. I'm not sure if that's even measurable. Someone should take a random sample of the internet (to be statistically relevant, it'd have to be a large sample) and compute the percentage of links that are not working. This might make a good distributed project - instead of solving the human genome or searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, we can simply prove something that we all know is true. Namely, that 90% of the internet is useless. (Present blog excluded, of course).
Words
I'm a word guy. I'm not very visual. That's why I like things like This Is the Title of the Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself. I'm intrigued by the self-referential.
Open Courseware
I had a great idea of writing supplemental materials for MIT's open courseware project, specifically in the Mathematics sections. There's some great stuff there, it's like being in a virtual library. I could spend hours browsing (but I need to get some cleaning done). MIT offers a course in Studies in Poetry: "Does Poetry Matter". The materials include some short (one-page) advice on how to write a paper.
How Tos
At work, I maintain a bunch of short "How To" plain text files, most just a few lines long. I think it's a worthwhile way of organizing information. I'm a checklist type of person. It's very useful to be able to answer someone's question completely by referring to a file. Plus, the file may contain bits of information that you would otherwise forget to mention. Finally, it's easily updateable.
Of course, there's a little overhead in organizing the files so you know where they are.
MSN?
Why the hell do I have a bookmark to MSN.com? Must have been added by some malware (possibly IE itself). Like that "Links" folder that always keeps appearing. Bookmarks ARE links. While I adore self-referentiality, I abhor redundancy. Hmm... "adore/abhor" make a nice pair. I should use them more often.
Channels?
Remember "push" technology? It was a big thing back in 1997. It eventually found its way into RSS, but only after some false starts.
Dailies
I'm really impressed that Brian Briggs is still at it. BBSpot seems like it's been around forever, and yet he still manages to serve up 5 links a day. It seems he's progressed from fighting Slashdot to fighting diggs.
Comics: Dilbert, Doonesbury, User Friendly, Sinfest, and Penny Arcade, of course. I just bought and read their third book.
Not quite Dailies
Technical Papers: The Register, Ars Technica,
I feel a little dishonest about putting a link to Wired News, as the URL I had bookmarked doesn't work (see dead links above), and I haven't visited the page in so long, that it could have been invalid for ages.
Not Visual
I'm not a visual person, but if I were, I'd spend a lot of time at Elfwood, and the Fairy Circle.
Thanks for your patience.
How many links constitute a valid blog entry? Is there a standard for this sort of thing? Does it help if there are insightful comments like "Hey, this is cool, check it out"?
Well, I'm going to clean out my bookmarks, and I invite you to come along for the ride. Some of these are probably pretty old, but you may have missed them the first time around. I'll do it all in a single blog. Hope you find something you like.
404
Quite a few of the links are dead. I wonder what the average lifespan of a URL is. I'm not sure if that's even measurable. Someone should take a random sample of the internet (to be statistically relevant, it'd have to be a large sample) and compute the percentage of links that are not working. This might make a good distributed project - instead of solving the human genome or searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, we can simply prove something that we all know is true. Namely, that 90% of the internet is useless. (Present blog excluded, of course).
Words
I'm a word guy. I'm not very visual. That's why I like things like This Is the Title of the Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself. I'm intrigued by the self-referential.
Open Courseware
I had a great idea of writing supplemental materials for MIT's open courseware project, specifically in the Mathematics sections. There's some great stuff there, it's like being in a virtual library. I could spend hours browsing (but I need to get some cleaning done). MIT offers a course in Studies in Poetry: "Does Poetry Matter". The materials include some short (one-page) advice on how to write a paper.
How Tos
At work, I maintain a bunch of short "How To" plain text files, most just a few lines long. I think it's a worthwhile way of organizing information. I'm a checklist type of person. It's very useful to be able to answer someone's question completely by referring to a file. Plus, the file may contain bits of information that you would otherwise forget to mention. Finally, it's easily updateable.
Of course, there's a little overhead in organizing the files so you know where they are.
MSN?
Why the hell do I have a bookmark to MSN.com? Must have been added by some malware (possibly IE itself). Like that "Links" folder that always keeps appearing. Bookmarks ARE links. While I adore self-referentiality, I abhor redundancy. Hmm... "adore/abhor" make a nice pair. I should use them more often.
Channels?
Remember "push" technology? It was a big thing back in 1997. It eventually found its way into RSS, but only after some false starts.
Dailies
I'm really impressed that Brian Briggs is still at it. BBSpot seems like it's been around forever, and yet he still manages to serve up 5 links a day. It seems he's progressed from fighting Slashdot to fighting diggs.
Comics: Dilbert, Doonesbury, User Friendly, Sinfest, and Penny Arcade, of course. I just bought and read their third book.
Not quite Dailies
Technical Papers: The Register, Ars Technica,
I feel a little dishonest about putting a link to Wired News, as the URL I had bookmarked doesn't work (see dead links above), and I haven't visited the page in so long, that it could have been invalid for ages.
Not Visual
I'm not a visual person, but if I were, I'd spend a lot of time at Elfwood, and the Fairy Circle.
Thanks for your patience.
posted by FlyingSheep @ 3:53 PM
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