Random thoughts at 1 AM

There’s an inherent flaw in using Google’s “pages like this” function. Some blogs can appear to be alike one day because they both discuss a certain topic, but may generally have very little to do with one another. This is especially true when you get a group of people talking about going to Gnomedex, because while we may have that event in common, the normal, every-day topics of our blogs may not intersect much at all. To some extent this is also true of following links, because if you enjoy the tech/geeky side of this blog, some of the non-tech blogs in my blogroll may not be to your liking, but I find them interesting.

Over the last few days, I’ve re-learned a couple of valuable lessons. One, stuff changes on the internet fast! It was only late March when I did Part 1 of the News Aggregator Showdown. and two months later I had people asking me to re-review some of the entrants because they had new versions out and fixed the problems I had. In those two months, or less, my opinion has completely changed because of the hard work put in by developers. Second, I learned that if you’re going to put your opinion online for all to see, you had better be prepared to back it up, and able to re-think it as more information becomes available.

With all the talk about RSS feeds and reading blogs through a news reader, let me just say this. Some blogs are simply better when you see the whole visual layout and wouldn’t be the same in a news reader. That being said, most tech blogs aren’t in that category (especially this one!), so it makes more sense to follow tech blogs in a news aggregator, but some other blogs really don’t work as well that way, because they’re about personality more than just information. When considering the personality of a blog the layout, the blogroll, the other links, everything come into play. You don’t get that in an RSS feed.

Dave, Scoble, and a bunch of other folks are coming to grips with the fact that you can’t always trust journalists to give you the truth, that they might be influenced by advertisers or the media conglomorates that they are employed by. No, really? You think the NYT, CNN, or NPR have their own agenda and are more than willing to sacrifice a little truth in pursuit of that agenda? Of course they are, the only thing surprising in your rants is that you seem to think this is something new. It’s not. ( Although it may be more obvious because of the current economic and technological situation, it’s been going on since well before I was even born.)

Here’s hoping you all have a good weekend!

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