Mark Evans is asking "Why is there so little original content?" on blogs - and his main thrust, that writing original content is hard, is true - so far as it goes. However, what he's missing is that there's value in link blogging. He says this:

Given Techmeme'€™s well-deserved reputation as being the place to quickly discover what'€™s going on in the tech world, Bott's assessment is blunt, critical, perhaps unfair but not entirely without merit. He's right; there is an awful lot of blog posts offering little or no insight other than referring to another blog. Rather than adding to the conversation, many of these posts come across as simply noise and bandwagon jumping.

There's more to it though. Consider news reporting. Does every news outlet maintain a bureau in every nation, or do they rely heavily on Reuters, AP (etc)? Back when TV and newspapers were the main interfaces for news, there was a lot of value in that - I grew up in suburban NY, and it was a heck of a lot easier to read a wire story relayed by the Poughkeepsie Journal than it was to get the data directly from the wire service.

So it is with Techmeme (et. al.) today. There are trusted sources for information now, just as there have always been. Techmeme serves as an aggregator for those top level sources, which makes it easier for the rest of us to find out what's going on.

Take this blog, for instance. My last post linked to something I found on Planet Squeak, which is fairly widely read in the Smalltalk community (more so by Squeakers). Should I assume that the information is "out there", and not link to things like that? Or, should I instead assume that my readership is a partially overlapping circle with theirs, and let my readers know about it? I picked the latter.

Sure, a fair bit of the conversation on sites like Techmeme is just echo chamber stuff - but over time, if you follow it, you learn which bloggers tend to add insight and which ones don't. I subscribe directly to the ones I like, and ignore the rest. This is a huge step forward from the pre-web era, where doing that kind of filtering was impossible for the average person.

Technorati Tags: communities, link blogging

I haven't expended much thought on the craptastic-ness that is MetaWebLog API recently, but I've been pulled back over recently. A guy I work with is trying to use a tool that publishes via that API, and it's not working against my server.

I was expecting yet another arcane issue, but so far as I can tell, this one is all on the third party. I tried having their tool hit my test server, and nothing ever got here. I then inserted logging code into the server and tried that - nothing. Well, it looks like I can toss the ball back their way for a bit - if it doesn't even get to my server, it's hardly my fault :)

Technorati Tags: xml-rpc, metaweblog api

You might have seen an Apache error if you tried visiting the site a little while ago; we had a brief hiccup. everything should be back to normal now.

Since the holiday season began, I've taken a year end hiatus from "Smalltalk Daily". I'll be getting back to the daily schedule for that next week at the latest (possibly Wednesday, but we'll see). All the holiday guests are gone from chez Robertson now, so things are slowly getting back to normal.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Scoble brings up something that isn't a problem for me (at least, not at the moment) - losing access to your content:

December 15, 2000. That’s when I started blogging. In seven years a lot has happened. The first two years of my blog have disappeared. They might be on a hard drive somewhere, I’m still trying to track them down.

I started later, in June, 2002 - but I have all the content, and can get to it any time I need to. For that matter, any of the bloggers on the site can get it from me (although, that's not as good as having access themselves, I'll admit).

Not everyone is going to solve this problem the way I have - write your server software and have access to the server itself. That does point out something that blog sites should offer (maybe they do, it's not like I've investigated much) - offer their users a way to archive their sites to local storage, or even something like S3. That way, anyone could ensure that their history doesn't disappear.

You're about to see a bunch of posts linking to the videos I've been putting together - rather than go back and re-tag the older posts, I've decided it would be simpler to just push out a set of posts with a new category. That'll create a new feed (with appropriate iTunes tagging), which I can then submit to iTunes as a video podcast.

It's always something. I left the MacBook in the office last night, so I didn't notice that the site went offline around 10:22 last night. I noticed this morning, but I didn't know quite enough about Apache settings to totally resolve the entire issue myself.

The server crashed, so most things came back with a restart. I got the public store back up, and the Wiki - but a CGI relay security issue was blocking access to the blogs and the main site. Thanks to one our engineers (thanks pete!) things are back to normal.

If you would prefer to see only the Smalltalk related posts here, I've created a new feed that aggregates those, and excludes the various other topics I write about. Subscribe to this feed, and that's all you see. I've sent a note to Planet Smalltalk - if they switch over to the new feed, then the non-ST stuff will drop off that site as well.

Update: Planet Smalltalk is now using the new feed, so the non-Smalltalk posts I make here are no longer part of that site.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk