Random Internet Discovery of the Week and a prelude to a series of posts a year away

See, now, this was the sort of thing I had in mind when StumbleUpon allowed me to bring more specific criteria to the RID! I may have to refer back to this when it comes time to run a related series next year. And that series is hinted at in the new label.

Important notice: Any comments left between now and the launch of the new site will not survive the launch of the new site. We are that close to launching the new site.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

Now this is why I was optimistic about the changes in StumbleUpon getting me better RIDs! I think this is the second time in RID history I've been delivered to something I was already familiar with. This version is more current, but if only the poses weren't so generic...

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

Okay, this is a little creepy. Are you absolutely desperate to talk to a real person, you absolutely can't stand going through automated menus, even if it means having to talk in Spanish? This list is for you! If there are people so desperate that this list is useful to them, it makes me wonder why ANYone would have an automated menu...

My (belated) thoughts on the Erin Andrews Peep Show

I hate the sports blogosphere's obsession with Erin Andrews. I think it's cheap and trashy and shows an objectification of women and that Andrews doesn't even look that great.

But guys, stand firm on your principles.

I've heard that several sports bloggers have called out the rest of the blogosphere for hypocrisy for criticizing the "EAPS" while making much of their traffic off pictures of Andrews.

I don't have a problem with making a distinction between an "acceptable" form of leering and "unacceptable" forms. That's probably going to be the second thing in a month that makes me run the risk of being flamed by feminists, but the fact is that men leering at hot chicks is as old as time, as is limits on it. That distinction, really, is everywhere in our society. As far as I'm concerned you can do whatever you want on the "right" side of the line as long as you stay on the "right" side of the line.

In fact, I'm going to go further. If I were in the position of a sports blogger who liked posting pictures of Erin Andrews, I would not have come to the sudden, shocking (SHOCKING) realization that this is WRONG and pulled back on the EA exploitation like, say, Fang's Bites did. No, I'd keep up the EA parade at the same pace I always did.

If you're going to decide it's wrong to exploit male lust for hot chicks for hits, regardless of whether or not the object is okay with it as Andrews has been, then be consistent with it and maintain the policy all along. (As I do. I prefer my site to be porn for the mind. Hey, maybe that'll be my tagline when the site relaunches: "Porn for the Mind". I'll get more hits than I otherwise would, certainly. Eh, maybe I'll stick with "Ideas every day". Even though I don't post every day.) But you can object to Andrews being exploited in the wrong way and still continue to exploit her in the right way if you feel it's okay. (Not that I'm precluding a legitimate change of heart here, of course.) All you have to do is make clear that you and your readers know where the line is and not to cross it.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

In what may be my last (real) post before the reboot, I bring you... South Park.

@trent_reznor's plan for turning indie music into webcomics!

New label time. I once had fantasies of becoming a musician, but I can't come up with an original beat to save my life, my voice sounds horrible recorded, and, like most of my fantasies, I liked the fame and impact more than I liked the actual, you know, work. Certainly I might have never had a chance to break out within a year of recording a short demo tape like I fantasized, at least not without getting a gig on American Idol, and I'd probably be the guy you laughed at on the audition shows anyway.

But that fantasy is at least a little closer to the reach of musicians today, thanks to that great invention that will define the next millennium or at least the next century, the Internet. Which brings me to Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor's thoughts on how aspiring musicians can take advantage of the Internet to break in to at least a limited extent.

Trent's advice in a nutshell: Forget about making any money off your records. Give it all away for free. Put your music on iTunes just to get the iTunes audience, but base your revenue model off selling tchotshkes like T-shirts and other premium content. Basically, the typical webcomics model.

Huh? Evidently Reznor needs to be introduced to Scott McCloud's 2001 theory that all the music industry needed to do was lower prices to the point that it would become too inconvenient to pirate to justify the savings. In other words, it's not strictly necessary to give everything away for free, just really, really cheap. "Ah, but that was just McCloud's attempt to justify his micropayments obsession..." Really? Then why did Xaviar Xerexes recently espouse essentially the same philosophy without noticing it even when I pointed it out to him? Besides, while micropayments have by and large been a complete failure, music in the form of iTunes has been one of the few places where it's worked.

Look, I know a lot of people don't like iTunes for loading down its music with DRM, but that just means there's an opening in the market for someone to come along and try and create an iTunes killer that sells music at iTunes prices or maybe even slightly higher but without DRM. Take a YouTube-like zeal to wiping out pirated music and you just might create a service that, eventually, one of the big boys decides they should move to to reach out to the people who have run away from iTunes to get a DRM-free experience. In the meantime it becomes the hub for music that hasn't sold out to The Man - and those musicians get to make at least a trickle of money off the music itself. Is the lower exposure worth it? I don't know, but I'm sure it is for some.

I don't like the notion of webcomiceers as glorified T-shirt salesmen and I'm not any more happy with the same notion as applied to indie rockers. The difference is, in the latter case, it's not necessary.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

I'm late on this RID and I didn't get any votes on the Da Blog Poll anyway, so I'm extending the poll another week. Here are the topics I'm currently subscribed to, and which I would tentatively remain subscribed to if the poll decides I should pick the topics myself (I don't know what a lot of these entail). I tried to pick as broad a cross-section as possible while also appealing to my own interests and trying to stick to the topic poll on the front page of the web site.

Arts/History:

• American History
• Arts
• Classical Studies
• Dancing
• Ethics
• Fine Arts
• History
• Humanities
• Live Theatre
• Logic
• Performing Arts
• Philosophy

Commerce:

• Business
• Capitalism
• Consumer Info

Computers:

• Computer Hardware
• Computers
• Cyberculture
• Internet
• Internet Tools
• Multimedia
• Online Games
• Software
• StumbleUpon
• Video Games
• Web Development
• Weblogs

Health:

• Health/Fitness
• Medical Science
• Self Improvement

Hobbies:

• Board Games
• Card Games
• Chess
• Collecting
• Humor
• Poker
• Roleplaying Games
• Satire

Home/Living:

• Family
• Food/Cooking
• Kids
• Married Life
• Parenting
• Pregnancy/Birth
• Teen Life

Media:

• Alternative News
• Animation
• Books
• Comic Books
• Fantasy Books
• Journalism
• Poetry
• Radio Broadcasts
• Science Fiction
• Shakespeare
• Television
• Writing

Music/Movies:

• Classic Films
• Music
• Movies

Outdoors:

• Agriculture
• Animals
• Nature
• Outdoors

Regional:

• USA

Religion:

• Athiest-Agnostic
• Religion
• Spirituality

Sci/Tech:

• Alternative Energy
• Anthropology
• Astronomy
• Aviation/Aerospace
• Biology
• Chemistry
• Civil Engineering
• Cognitive Science
• Ecology
• Economics
• Environment
• Gadgets
• Geography
• Geoscience
• Linguistics
• Mathematics
• Meteorology
• Physics
• Physiology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Science/Tech
• Sociology
• Space Exploration
• Trains/Railroads
• Transportation

Society:

• Activism
• Anarchism
• Biographies
• Career Planning
• Communism
• Conservative Politics
• Counterculture
• Culture/Ethnicity
• Dating Tips
• Feminism
• Government
• Hedonism
• Int'l Development
• Law
• Liberal Politics
• Liberties/Rights
• Men's Issues
• Military
• News (General)
• Personal Sites
• Politics
• Socialism
• University/College

Sports:

• American Football
• Baseball
• Basketball
• Golf
• Hockey
• Martial Arts
• Motor Sports
• Soccer
• Sports (General)
• Tennis

This excludes a pretty significant number of topics that had been on before, despite the overall increase in topics, and most of them were not even considered for the new list. Just so you know how dire the situation was.

Of course, if the alternative is an ad-overloaded page trying to further or start an internet meme, I'm not sure it's much of an improvement...

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

I'm linking to this even though I'm not sure how useful it would be (I use an Excel spreadsheet as a "checkbook" of sorts) and I'm announcing right now that this will be the last RID under the status quo. That sort of violates the Da Blog Poll, on which the only vote I received was the one I was least a fan of - "leave it as is" - but that's no longer an option.

StumbleUpon has either radically broadened the choice of categories to the point that it now requires categorization of the categories, or has merely broadened the choice of categories available to me. There is a cap of 127 categories, and there are far more categories than that to choose from. The previous thesis of the Random Internet Discovery was that I was opening your horizons to stuff from every category.

If the RID is to continue, it will have to involve some sort of cap on topics, some form of selectiveness. I'd really rather not have my topics determined by the fact I was subscribed to them before getting a broadening of my options. That's practically the same as having them determined at random. So I'm reopening the Da Blog Poll I conducted when the RID was just beginning. Selecting all the topics is not an option, so the question simply asks whether I should select the topics myself, poll you, discontinue the RID, or something else. (If I was scared at a potential 78-topic poll a year ago, imagine the chaos that would ensue with hundreds of topics! That may have to be a comment thread, not a poll!) The poll will run for two weeks and the topics will be self-selected next week, along with a list of the topics I would select.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

Okay, right as I'm moved to ditch the RID entirely, I finally find something worth commenting on. Because this is pretty much pseudoscience.

First of all, I kind of doubt the underlying idea that cravings for certain types of food are really cravings for the things those foods contain. Especially when one of the claims is that if you've got a hankering for alcohol or drugs, it's not because you have an addiction to the drugs themselves; you just need to find alternate sources of protein, calcium, and potassium! (Similarly, if you've got a hankering for tobacco, it's not nicotine you're craving, but silicon and tyrosine!) Second, that's just one example of these people providing one thing and then a laundry list of things you might really be craving instead to the extent you wonder "Wouldn't it be easier to give in to the craving and not have to pick one thing from column A and one from column B?"

Oh, and "bread" or "toast"? These people really believe in the Atkins diet and other low-carb diets, don't they? Then again, they think "cool drinks" are a sign you need manganese and should gorge on things like walnuts instead of a sign you need, oh I don't know, hydration or, say, to cool off...

Speaking of hydration, if you have a preference for liquids rather than solids, what you need is water (and you should get it from flavored water? WTF?). On the other hand, if you have a preference for solids rather than liquids, you also need water because you're so dehydrated you've lost your thirst!

Then again, it's all coming from a naturopathy site preaching one guy's back-to-nature New Age crap, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised at the misinformation... (No, wait, it's the mainstream that's peddling misinformation! It all makes sense now!)

The people you meet when you Twitter.

I know, I know, follower counts are really meaningless, but it's still exciting to see my follower count rise over 60. Yes, some of them are spammer accounts, and some are semi-automated accounts that automatically follow anyone who follows them, but there are still enough legit ones that I suspect quite a few of them, maybe even the majority, have to be reading me on Twitter but not Da Blog. (Not that I've made things easier with my paucity of posts recently. We'll see what the effect of this post is, though.)

But I'm not sure about some of these followers, who seem to automatically follow anyone who happens to mention a certain key word relevant to them.

Okay, I can understand AspergerKids and TMS01 following me after I mentioned Asperger's in a recent tweet. I actually happen to have Asperger's, so the connection is logical there. But... what the hell is up with GHuntersFansite following me after I said Cartoon Network was starting a Ghost Hunters ripoff? If there's one thing I'm not into, it's that sort of claptrap.

I'm not sure whether I hate it for its dishonesty, or whether I love it for the sheer irony of it...

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

Is it a bad sign when (I believe) two consecutive posts are spent on the RID?

Is it also a bad sign that I couldn't think of anything else to say about this?

Save the RID, please! If the current results hold - they're currently for maintaining the status quo - I think this may be the very last RID ever.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

It'd be nice if this told you what it is before throwing you into it.

The current RID poll is likely to end on Monday regardless of when it says it's going to end, simply because the changes that will happen to Da Blog then are too major.

Sorry, @RaysIndex, but you're no better than the other roids speculators.

I'm sorry, Mr. "Professor". But you're reading way too much into Jon Heyman's 2007 "does Sosa belong in the Hall?" piece if you think it makes him a hypocrite now for calling out people who baselessly speculate whether this guy or that guy is using steroids.

You have to keep in mind that Heyman did not start the speculation that Sammy Sosa had used steroids, especially after his disasterous testimony on Capitol Hill. In fact, I think his piece could be read as a defense of Sosa against people who want to keep him out of the Hall against baseless speculation.

Steroids speculation is making everyone crazy. But one of them is not Jon Heyman. It's the nameless proprietor of the Rays Index.

If the blogosphere is going to be the mainstream media of the future, it needs to be able to look critically on itself and catch itself when it errs.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

The world's largest Linux ad!

I may have to cut the poll short at the end of the week, and I have to say, I'm dreading the only vote I've gotten so far potentially being the only vote.

The ideal Firefox RSS plugin. Also, why Firefox may be driving me back to IE8.

Everybody loves Firefox. It's the best web browser in the history of history. Especially compared with IE, which sucks so badly the only reason anyone uses it at all is because it comes with Windows and the great unwashed don't know any better. It's the worst web browser in the history of history.

But for as much as IE's recent browser releases may have aped Firefox in the same way its Windows releases since 95 have aped Mac, in aping Firefox IE7 may have leapfrogged it in the area of RSS feeds, at least for novices. Microsoft, incredibly, went from "no RSS support at all" to "better than Firefox, at least without plugins".

(Depending on your point of view, IE8 may have done the same thing in other areas.)

In my review of Sluggy Freelance, I found a blog post from 2006 wondering when RSS' "killer app" would come along, and suggested it may have turned out to be IE7. Now I think I can safely add, "And not just because most people don't use Firefox." FF's RSS reading model is the idea of "live bookmarks". Each RSS feed is essentially treated as a special type of folder amongst your bookmarks; each individual entry is a bookmark within that folder. It's a nice metaphor, but I think it kind of misses the point of RSS, especially when FF has no native way to easily see when there are new items. You have to install plugins for that. (Perhaps FF's model was designed for sites that completely clear out their RSS feeds on a regular basis because they have such a high density of posts.)

IE, on the other hand, gets RSS. Feeds are placed on a separate "feeds" panel, but otherwise can be organized in much the same way as ordinary favorites. Feeds you've saved are regularly checked (as often as 15 minutes if you set it that way, although annoyingly some sites arbitrarily set feed times for less often and IE treats those as the minimum instead), and if there are new items, the feeds turn bold. When you open a feed it opens a sort of web page displaying every item in the feed (if there are new items it displays only the new items) along with their descriptions.

I think that if Firefox had a plugin that showed a simple alert whenever your feeds were updated, perhaps by making them bold or something to set them apart from feeds with no new items, and carried that bolding to the folder level (so if a folder contained feeds with new items it would turn bold as well, again aping IE but something that neither the Boox or LiveClick plugins do), something like that would probably spark a larger wave of people deserting IE for Firefox. Ideally such a plugin would work from within the existing Live Bookmarks system, just to set a limit so people wouldn't have to wade into the wide, wild world of independent RSS readers, as well as to prevent confusion and later frustration when subscribing to a new feed, and to ease feed input. The best plugin I've seen for someone transitioning from IE is probably the Feed Sidebar, which does a pretty good job of capturing the benefits of the Firefox model of feeds in a form familiar to IE users, but I would like the ability to sort feeds into folders that alert in the same way as individual feeds, or at least tweak the order feeds update and have some control over what order feeds are listed. I don't know if that would be possible without leaving the Live Bookmark system, however.

In any case those issues aren't as big of dealbreakers as I originally thought, and I probably would be using the Feed Sidebar long-term for my RSS-checking needs... if I were sticking with Firefox at all. But I'm not. You know how, to hear from many Firefox partisans, "oh, once you try Firefox you'll never go back to IE!"? Well, I'm running screaming back to IE. Even after the issues with IE that led me to leave in the first place.

Here's the thing. When Firefox partisans tell you how much faster it is than IE they're not telling you the whole story. There are two components to speed of a web browser. There's the speed with which it surfs the Internet... and there's the speed it takes to run. And Firefox - I don't know if this is just because of plugins (every RSS reader I tried at least partially makes Firefox freeze temporarily while checking feeds) but sometimes it will slow down for no apparent reason - is a huge resource hog. I think it might be using something like 300 MB memory regularly, depending on how you interpret the Task Manager, something IE only achieved when it was really reaeeaaalllly taxed. My computer was basic in 2006, so Firefox is as slow as molasses. Maybe one day I'll install Firefox on my desktop once I get a real job and a real Internet connection I can hook it up to, but for now I'm re-setting up IE8 as my default web browser the instant I post this post.

Now, of course, I still have some issues with IE8, so: any Chrome or Opera users out there? I'm looking for a web browser that will operate reasonably well in Windows XP on a 1.7Ghz Pentium processor with 504 MB RAM. (I sometimes have 10-20 tabs open in a single window with pages loaded but mostly not being used.) Preferably, I'd like something that browses the web faster than IE, but actually running faster than IE would be a big plus as well. (IE has had no shortage of random freezes of its own, but FF randomly freezes several times a day.) I'd also like an IE8/FF-style favorites bar, but could go without several FF features I like because this is almost unusable. Nice but not required: an FTP system that works better than Windows' built-in one. I think I have one or two other issues with IE8, probably holdovers from IE7, but damned if I can think of them right now.

I may take Chrome out for a spin as soon as next weekend unless I hear that it's not suited to my computer or browsing habits.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

Experimenting with doing this from Friendbar's "lucky site" button. As I'll explain in a post later today, I might not keep it up even if it works. And because it's "a site that is popular today" I'll be late to the party instead of "discovering" anything.

Is the story in the headline - Google Analytics' dominance - or in the first paragraph - we like to know how our info is being used?

Now I could be wrong about the first sentence...

Weren't ESPN The Magazine stories placed on Insider before they launched a new website with all the bells and whistles?

And does this mean I have to start paying for ESPN The Magazine stories (with an Insider subscription that requires an ESPN The Mag print subscription anyway)? (I'd rather not lose Bill Simmons' magazine columns!)

Could actually be worth watching... basically one test of the "you can only read our stuff if you pay to receive the dead trees" model for Saving Newspapers (tm).

This might be a bad sign for Windows 7. On the other hand, IE7 was the "Vista Browser" and it kicked ass...

I was actually a little psyched to get IE8. Maybe it could fix some of the more quirky aspects of IE7, some of its slow stretches. maybe it could even keep from stopping my computer from hibernating.

Well, the new "accelerators" are overrated - the people behind the sites you visit actually have to create them, so no Yahoo Mail accelerator for me. It and a lot of the other new features are hopelessly gimmicky. I mean, color-coded tabs? Especially when I can't define each tab's color?

What's more, Autocomplete is now limited to the first (not, say, most recent or relevant) 20 history results (and most recent 5, plus any favorites) as part of "spiffing up" Autocomplete. And scrolling with the side of my touchpad sucks now for speed-scrolling. (Word has a similar problem, in that it'll sometimes refuse to scroll past the insertion point.) And the slowness issues, if anything, may have gotten worse.

I had been considering taking Firefox for a test drive to see how it could match up compared to the more concerning aspects of IE7. The main thing preventing me from doing so was the promise of IE8 and its new features, which either would be enough to keep me from going to Firefox or wouldn't be. I didn't think it was possible, but IE8 has actively driven me to Firefox.

(Oddly, even though I myself use IE and IE is the most popular browser, most visitors to Da Blog use Firefox. Maybe that says something about the sorts of people who would visit Da Blog...)

Tweet, tweet! Tweet, tweet, tweet!

The stated purpose of Twitter is to exchange answers to the question, "What are you doing?" with friends and family. There are a few obvious problems with the concept. In some sense, it's really just a service to send a text message to a bunch of people at once, as though you couldn't do that anyway if you have a half-decent phone. Then there's the obvious question whether you, or your friends or family, would want your friends and family to know about every single thing you're doing. There's a limit to how much following you can do at once, especially if you're getting text messages for every single tweet (meaning you're constantly interrupted by each incoming text) and racking up your text message bill. There are all sorts of horror stories of people begging their friends, "don't tweet me every couple of minutes!" and "I don't want to know what you had for dinner last night!"

In fact, if Twitter was as simple as I just described, it probably would not be on its way to becoming The Next Big Thing(tm). Instead the makers of Twitter made several decisions that, in retrospect, represent them lucking out on something they could cash in on if they just found the right business model:

• Tweets are public. Anyone can read them, even people who haven't signed up for Twitter (contrast, say, Facebook). This is why Twitter is called a "microblogging" platform instead of, say, a "mass text message" platform.
• Followers control whether they want to follow you, not the other way around. It would be at the very least impractical for Ashton Kutcher to send messages to a million-plus screaming fans all at once. Big celebrities and news organizations like CNN could set up a "text this word to this number and get alerts right to your phone!" service, and probably do (for one thing, they could charge their own fees for it). But Twitter allows them to save the expense of having such a system AND open them up to anyone who desires to read them, in the spirit of the Internet itself. In fact, followship is not even a reciprocal relationship as with most social networking services, so it doesn't have the "commitment" of "friendship", and you don't have to follow someone you're not interested in just because they want to follow you. (I suspect some celebrities and corporate tweeters don't get this and blindly follow everyone that follows them.)
• It's possible to run Twitter without using text messages, or even going to the site that often. Twitter has opened things up for anyone to "build a better Twitter". I'm not really sure what the point is - either Twitter's admitting their site sucks or it works just fine and there's no need to use something else - but I do know I would like a Twitter platform that won't go on the fritz if it's disconnected from the Internet (i.e., it'll pick right back up when you re-connect to the Internet). And that won't prevent me from hibernating but there's only one way to find out if that's the case.
• I think Twitter itself anticipated that their service would not just be used to answer the question "What are you doing?" even though almost everything about their site works under that assumption. How else to explain the existence of "@replies" or "retweets" (admittedly the latter is unofficial) or other such things? Twitter clearly sees itself as a social networking platform of some kind.

At the same time, Twitter's relative independence from social networking platforms like MySpace and Facebook work to its benefit as well, including the non-reciprocity of followship, which actually creates more of an incentive for people to follow you when it means strictly "receiving their tweets". If Twitter were just another social networking platform it probably would never have been able to run down the giants. By focusing all its attention on a sole feature - quick, bang-bang updates sent out to as many people as want to hear them - and downplaying the social networking aspect of its existence, Twitter has established for itself a separate identity. You don't go to Twitter to meet new people or whatever else you do on MySpace, nor should you, and you don't go to Facebook to write a bunch of little blurbs every half hour.

Okay, so why tweet instead of blog? Isn't tweeting just an extremely limited form of blogging? There's the social networking aspects, but Blogger's decided to ape those with its "follower" feature; there's the ability to receive text messages instead of always going to a computer, but surely someone could have come up with a service that did that without outfitting it with all the bells and whistles of Twitter, right? There's the ability to send text messages to tweet, but surely an outfit like Blogger could institute that capability too, right? So why is it that blogs - Blogger blogs even, like Fang's Bites - not only have Twitter accounts on top of their blogs, but use them almost entirely to post links to their blog posts? I have to imagine it's to allow text message notification to people for whom RSS feeds aren't immediate enough, or blog promotion. (I personally actually prefer to read Fang's Bites off the RSS feed than in its "original" form.)

Perhaps more interesting is those people who put some things in their Tweeters and other things on their blogs. Why not just put the stuff you're tweeting on your blogs and stop antagonizing readers by either polluting their text messages or Twitter roll or withholding content from them? When I made Da Blog's tagline "The ONLY blog written by Morgan Wick", the intended joke was that of course it was the only blog written by me, because why would I create another one when I had this one? Why would anyone start a second blog - especially one that limited how much you could write so severely - when they already had one?

Twitter really hit mainstream consciousness with the Ashton Kutcher-CNN "race to a million" and Oprah deciding to get a Twitter account - but the mere fact that Kutcher and CNN could race to a million showed that Twitter had attained some sort of mainstream acceptance even before that. People have been pushing Twitter as the "next big thing" since at least 2007 (it only launched in 2006). Celebrities and ordinary Joes alike have flocked to Twitter in droves over the past year or so, convinced they have to get on board with this next big thing, and there is some evidence they eventually get confused or frustrated and quit.

Forget, for a second, whether or not the dropoff rate is the result of people using "better Twitters", as opposed to using the website, as some have suggested. Newbies are less likely to know they exist, so there's probably some genuine dropoff. I've listed above some of the confusing aspects of Twitter, areas where the uninitiated might wonder, what the hell is the point? I think some of the people wondering about Twitter should make sure they've looked at the tweeters of people who have already taken to it like a glove so they can really get a feel for the technology and what the community is like.

Twitter isn't just narcissistic; it can be a more two-way form of communication than almost anything else on the Internet, including ordinary blogs with their comments and even discussion forums, as you can have public conversations with anyone you're following and/or who's following you, from anywhere in the world - or even have a true "chat" room where just about anyone can come in and out. In this way it can be a way to elicit comments or contributions or other such things, invoking the "wisdom of crowds". The immediacy of Twitter helps greatly with this as well; you don't necessarily have to wait for a follower to go to the computer and actually look to check. You can use Twitter for personal purposes as well, such as to-do lists or notes, or to manage projects, or to cover events "as they happen" (impractical with a blog), or things you'd never expect to do with such a simple concept. There are a lot of rather unique Twitter accounts with some unique applications of the concept, more than I could possibly list here.

I said in Da Blog's introductory post that I would never have a MySpace or Facebook account. I saw them as things that were overly popular that I was therefore, in some way, "too cool" for. I had no use for them, and if I were to hop on their bandwagon I would effectively be going along with the crowd and doing what everyone else was doing. But Twitter intrigues me. In an odd way, I actually have some personal interest in Twitter's stated goal, of letting people know "what are you doing?" Since I was very young, I imagined any number of imaginary TV channels that in some way involved me and any number of... I won't call them imaginary friends, per se, but imaginary people. Through various corporate acquisitions and permutations (I have very well-developed fantasies - I read Calvin and Hobbes as a kid), I've managed to maintain these fantasies in some form all the way to the present day. Through all these permutations, I almost always managed to have one channel that followed me around all day long in whatever I did, except maybe when I was eating. I've always had some interest in the rituals of my own life and how exactly I spent my day every day, what I was doing at each moment. Twitter and I were practically made for each other!

So I've been thinking about hopping on board the Twitter bandwagon for a little while - I've only had sufficient exposure to it to really think about it this year, but still. This is actually a little sooner than I had intended to do so, as I had intended to hop on board around the same time as certain other developments (that haven't happened yet) came along, but I received an assignment from my communications class to (among other things) keep a log of my media usage for a four-day period. That aligns with one of the things I was intending to tweet about, and I just loved the irony of maintaining such a log on Twitter. From now until Monday, relevant entries in said log will be marked with the "#MediaLog" keyword.

So say hello to the real-life Morgan Wick Channel, also known as www.twitter.com/morganwick, your one-stop shop for all things Morgan Wick. Here you'll find:

• Everything (or almost everything) I'm doing. Am I on the bus? In class? Checking feeds? Working on the latest blog post? Doing actual work? Watching TV? You'll know.
• If I'm moved to leave a comment on something somewhere on the Internet, I'll usually elect to write a mirroring Twitter post, depending on how much I've talked about the topic on Da Blog and some other factors. (Sports or webcomics? Yes. Global warming? No.)
• Anything happening in the Morgan Wick Online Universe (which I intend to tighten soon). Every time I make a post on Da Blog, it will appear on the Twitter feed with a link. This includes "web site news" items, so you'll get tweets every time I update the web site. I'll also tweet every time a new Sandsday goes up, which should be a more reliable and punctual option than the Komix feed, as well as alert you when I need to post the new comic on Da Blog. If I have other projects that for whatever reason I don't post about on Da Blog every time a new one goes up, I'll tweet those as well. This is another reason for me to go to Twitter: anyone who likes me for anything else will be exposed to any of my other projects!
• Other comments as I'm moved to leave them, including my more ranty moments, which will be phased off Da Blog.

I think there are enough problems with Twitter as constituted now that I'm not sure how full-bore I can go into it. Right now I'm (or rather, my mom is) charged for every text I send or receive, meaning I need to avoid texting any tweets if at all possible, and I either can't go around following everyone under the sun or I need to turn off text reception of tweets. There are plenty of other reasons for the latter; simply put, as presently constituted there is a practical limit to how many people you can follow without getting overwhelmed by tweets, many of which you're probably not the least bit interested in.

I'm laying down a few ground rules for my use of Twitter that will also affect what I post to Da Blog:

• Any post that could be a tweet will be posted as a tweet. If I'm ever tempted to post something shorter than 140 characters it will be posted on Twitter and not Da Blog.
• If I am ever tempted to write something that would span two or more Twitter posts it will be posted as a blog post instead. This could potentially actually counteract the loss of short posts to Twitter; I'll go along and happen upon something I want to make into a tweet, but it comes out too long. Off to Da Blog with it, even if I would not have made it a blog post otherwise!
• Some Da Blog posts may have titles written with Twitter syntax. For example, I could write a post directed to the "example" Twitter account, and so I would have a post with a title beginning "@example". If you decide to rely on Twitter to find out when new blog posts are up you'll want to make sure you're seeing all my @replies. (UPDATE: Okay, never mind. See comments.) Also, from now on if I have to put up Sandsday on Da Blog the post title will start "Sandsday #XXX" to mirror the Twitter format, as opposed to now when it's just a random thought on the action.
• No retweets. I find merely copy-pasting someone else's tweet to be essentially pointless. Instead I'll just make it a reply to the tweet. (There's a chance I'll retweet in the title of a blog post once or twice.)

Links to my Twitter feed will be located in three places: on the right sidebar of Da Blog, on the front page and 404 page of the web site on the sidebar, and on Sandsday, both in the sidebar and below the comic. Da Blog's sidebar, in particular, will contain "Da Tweeter", which will display my tweets in real time.

Okay, now, I spent long enough writing this introductory post that I'm going to have lunch and immediately start working on a paper for my communication class. What will I do next? You'll have to read my tweeter to find out.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

Okay, this blog has a very very weird update schedule. No posts since January 2007... and before that the last post was August 2006, and before January 2006 the last post was in 2004.

Do you see why I struggle to keep this feature up?