Craig’s Musings

I’ve been busy at work again after taking a great vacation with my family to San Diego (Mission Beach area). So, I now have 54 items in the Reply follow up category within my RSS Bandit reader. (I tend to use this category for posts related to blogging, RSS, syndication, etc.) Let’s see how far I can reduce this collection before my son wakes up from his nap.

A fair amount of what I’ve flagged represents what I’ll call interesting perspective:

• Scoble: A note to execs: you don’t think twice about speaking to a conference with 1500 people. Why do you keep turning down blogs that reach more people?
• Sun: policy on public discourse (e.g. blogs); Tim Bray: behind the scenes (i.e. publishing the policy) - The real goal isn’t to get everyone at Sun blogging, it’s to become part of the industry conversation. Simon Phipps echos: It’s not enough to listen to the conversation; success in business will increasingly depend on participating in the conversation.
• Bray: How fast is this thing growing? (i.e. number of feed readers)
• Lee Lefever: What Conference Organizers Need to Know About Weblogs
• Amy Gahran: It’s important to envision webfeeds as a communication medium, rather than as the product of a particular technical standard. Technology changes, a lot!
• Larry O’Brien: Is it better to be indexed than it is to be read?
• Lenn Pryor: What makes a good blog? A good blog has an authoritative voice, one that is an expert on something, one that has clear focus and a reliable expectation of what you will predictably see as a reader upon visiting regularly. Just as Lenn closed his post by asking what his focus should be within his blog, I find myself asking the same thing. (Lenn follows up here.)For example, I happen to disagree significantly with Lenn’s views on the war against terrorism, gay marriage, etc., but I tolerate such posts because I respect the position that he’s in at Microsoft, which gives him a unique vantage point on blogging, transparency, etc. However, signal-to-noise can be tenuous, and every feed is just a click away from being on or off.
• Heather Leigh (Recruiter, Microsoft): Does blogging make you a better candidate for Microsoft? Lenn replies (e.g. treat your blog as your business card and think of it as a career tool).

I really need to get my RSS feed up and running. Just as soon as I do, I’ll be regularly pinging weblogs.com so that folks can discover me more easily and I can gain the benefit of that discovery (e.g. other viewpoints, similar interests, related sidebars, etc.). Oh that’s right, Dave Winer is transitioning this service away. Perhaps once the transition to buzzword.com is complete, a similar service will be available there. This news causes me to seriously consider where my content continues to live and to also consider costs-benefits with a particular choice.

By the way, I only whittled off 14 items before the wake-up siren sounded. Guess I’ll knock off the rest later.