This post is about blogs as a medium. I know this is a tiresome topic beaten to death by those who are so preoccupied with espousing the legitimacy of the medium that their particular blog becomes the inane, illegitimate exception they rail against, but bear with me. This one is mildly insightful, though those parts are almost entirely stolen.

John C Dvorak is a tech writer who I've been aware of for my entire adult life thanks to my mother's subscriptions to various Ziff Davis publications, and is quite a crank. He has a show to that effect, even, which I listen to on my obscenely long commute to work. He has a blog (drink, TWIT listeners!) I subscribe to and for the most part enjoy, despite the fact that it is ugly as sin and about as unified design-wise as a Tripod or Geocities page in 1997. (I am harsh because I care, John.)

Anyway, on TWIT (another commute favorite) a while back, he put in pretty clear terms the main camps of blogs, in a way I had tried in vain to nail down in the past. While I didn't fully agree with the way he valued each on the TWIT episode, I think he put it quite expertly on his site's Blog Primer:

First of all there are two categories of blogs. One is the traditional web-log where a web surfer shares his online discoveries. And the second is the web diary where person shares his or her thoughts of the day. Most blogs of either style often have elements of the other style once in a while. A diarist will often discuss a link while traditional web-loggers will commonly ramble on about something that happened to them that day.

I think this is a very accurate and uncharacteristically even handed take on the "blogosphere," which is a word I despise so much that my use of it should tell you this is a serious discussion.

This blog has been in the "web diary" camp for the bulk of its life, though as Dvorak points out there is always some cross pollination - so I've had some "Check out this cool thing I found" posts as well. Even those were mostly autobiographical in nature, though, and the effort involved in stringing them together into a theme and narrative usually meant the links were either incredibly esoteric or lacking in the hot and fresh department.

I've wanted to move to a more balanced approach, being a more "professional" style blog, where instead of myspace-style articles about what I had for lunch and cryptic references made to people who (I thought) will never read this, I had general interest commentary on the massive amounts of material that certain entities trickle through the tubes.

The problem I had was response time. I do like to string these things together into a coherent theme, and have something more to say than "go look it's cool lol." I am wasting a degree in journalism by doing consulting work, and damn it, those skills are gonna get used, even if only in a capacity where I constantly talk about how I am not using them. However, in the blagohedron, life moves fast. It's hard to do the kind of themes and commentary I want to do without posting weeks-old news.

After a trip to the venerable Chris' blog (or blag, as I'm sure he'd be honored to have it called) I found he had implemented a Google Reader widget that I will from now on refer to as the Magic Share-O-Tron 7500. As previously noted, I am now a fairly devout Google Reader user for my various feeds, and I star and tag some items with the intention of manually stringing them together into blog posts of merit and value.

Rarely does this actually happen, however, because I am still terrible at adhering to a writing schedule.

So, to hell with it. The Share-o-Tron 7500 not only creates a feed people can subscribe to if they wish to see what I am finding interesting, but a web widget you can simply drop into pages and give people a glimpse at what you find cool. This is almost like automating a large segment of the second camp of blogs out there - those of this format:

Directly Copied Headline
Copier byline, timestamp, tags

Incredibly brief summary, often not including data past the 2nd paragraph of the source material.

LINK (via Link Source)

Comment on this (95 trolls so far)

Automating this kind of slipshod rumor-milling wouldn't be such a bad thing - you'd have a lot less of those RUMOR posts with a sensationalist headline that is based on assumption that is clearly debunked by the 3rd paragraph of the source article - and a HELL of a lot less comment flamewars pointing that out. There are a number of sites, video gaming in particular, who make their ad revenue on the back of this principle.

A note about these kinds of sites - I like some of them, I read some of them. I do get a bit infuriated when I see saucy headlines that are clearly wrong if you read the entire source article linked in the post, but I'm not trying to be Mr. Journalism Snob here. I like those blogs, I just don't want to be those blogs.

For my purposes, I still want to try to actually insert some informed commentary and insight into the list of links. However, I am not paid to do this, and have no intentions of adding advertising anytime soon, so the time I have available to do that is lacking.

There's something to be said for zero commentary, though. It's not slipshod, it's nonexistant. What made it click in my head when I saw the Share-O-Tron 7500 on Chris' site was that it's like a wire service, which is an edifice of journalism I can still respect.

I may be too slow to react to be an effective pundit, but there's still something of value in my being a filter. So, if I stole Chris' feature added my own Share-O-Tron 7500, I could still "post" hot links by virtue of me reading them, but I wouldn't have to take the time to write the level of commentary I feel they deserve. They would exist in a vacuum - without insightful commentary, but also without ill-informed disinformation.

Awesome.

The next step was to skin the Share-O-Tron 7500, because drop in components are useless to me if they look hacked together...like a Tripod or Geocities page from 1997. It has to gel with the rest of my layout, or its out - especially since I am in the middle of a grandiose site redesign for Patrickcentral.com.

Google doesn't make this easy, but it's not impossible either. You have to choose the unskinned version of the widget on their little code cut-and-paste tool, and then make CSS classes matching those their script applies to each of the elements of the widget.

A rudimentary version of a Z Axis skinned one is available here.

I'll be working to integrate it into the main design soon. For now, you can also get a feed of my share-o-tron here.

We'll have to see how well I do at having my cake and eating it too.

[choose the form of the destructor]