I think I blog (and facebook and keep web pages, photos online, participate in mailing lists):
1. to keep a diary for myself and maybe family/friends/other evolved lifeforms or aliens visiting earth a billion years in future.
2. to post useful info (partly for myself) but also where it would be useful to others
3. keep contact and make contacts with friends/colleagues
No 1. definately works, I look back on stuff I have for 1998/1999 and I can remember tons.
But generally I don't have a good memory before then.
Though I can when prompted remember certain things very well.
No 2./3. works also, sometimes I get feedback from friendly/grateful and sometimes anonymous people :)
I think about these things on occasion "Why Blog?".
This blog entry from Ciáran of FSF is good and serendipitous with my thinking at this moment:
'I always tell people to blog what they’re working on. "If it’s worth doing, it’s worth blogging!"'
That on philosophy of blogging and blogging tips here: http://blogs.fsfe.org/ciaran/?m=200812 in Ciarán’s free software notes
Disclaiming
I always have had a self-deprecating disclaimer somewhere on the front page of my (very badly tended and organized) web pages.
In fact in University for a time in my VAX logout script I had also included a voluminous disclaimer.
Partially because disclaimers(especially in software licences/copy(right|left)s) are a bit of an in-joke for me and presumably other software people.
Here now on my (very badly tended and organised) web pages the intro/disclaimer is like this:
"Content in these pages is my diary, links to my more current blog and collected content on things that are of interest to me. These pages are very much old-style web pages. i.e. a bit of a mess of waffle. Old and unmaintained stuff. Experiments. Sorry. Google will hopefully help people pick out nuggets of information from all the guff.
I'm trying to dump all the contents of my brain onto these (and other) internet pages but I find the baud rate on my nerual->finger->keyboard->internet connection is terrible and my brain capacity is so huge (of course) that it's going slowly. Maybe I could summarise a few things that might be half interesting/useful to people and leave it at that? "
see http://www.dspsrv.com/~jamesc/
I don't see you laughing.
:-E
Come on! Laugh.
:-P''
Okay. It's waffle in itself.
But the world is a very very complicated place.
I have realised you can only describe a teeny tiny small part of something in any diary/blog post or longer article.
And I'm trying to lower/prepare/set customer/reader expectations at an acceptable level.
Any post is not complete unless you take into account the whole system.
But unless you make and abstract model of the problem and assume lots and summarize you can't be useful.
Maybe. I just think about stuff too much and should just try and DO stuff more.
DO including blogging of course.
Which is itself a form of inaction because whren you're writing a blog/diary entry/article you're not DOing stuff ... properly.
ER last night a buddhist body relocation expert: "If you choose not to act then inaction in itself is a form of action".
enough guff
