Blogs traditionally have had two types of content — stuff made up from the blogger’s head (usually, though not always, with a link or two as to the inspiration), and the other extreme, links to stuff you want other folks to see (sometimes with a comment or two as to why) but don’t have anything to add to.
So this blog is, and remains, my primary way of nattering on about stuff in my life and the world around me as it moves me to do so. And that isn’t going anywhere.
I’ve been spending more time over on Google Reader over the past several months looking at various feeds from various sites — and, more importantly, sharing items over there for other to look at. Since I can easily do this off my Blackberry while commuting by train (or other down times), I’ve had more than one person (Deb, Doyce) poke fun at me for the volume of shared items so generated.
For those not on Google Reader (a very fine tool and one I cannot recommend enough), I’ve had a truncated rolling list of the things I shared there over in the sidebar under “Unblogged Bits” — this courtesy of the “Add a Clip” feature in Google Reader itself. But given that I can easily generate 20-30 or more shared items in a given day, that little snapshot of the most recent 8 or so just doesn’t cut it. Further, those shared items leave out any of the comments I (or someone earlier) added to the shared post (my rule of thumb is that if I add more than a paragraph or two of comment, I star the item instead and turn it into a blog post later).
In short, for folks who just read this blog, you’re only getting part of the stuff I want to natter about.
For a while I tried recapping daily (or multiple-daily) stuff from the Reader in a “Potpourri” post — but that turned out to be too much work (easily half an hour per such post, plus ongoing copy-pasting, etc.).
Fortunately, GReader offers a bit of a help, by actually letting me reference a page that shows all my “shared” items. It’s sort of a blog-light, and until I figure out a way to slipstream items more cleanly into my main blog, that will have to do the trick. My shared page is located here, and I’ve added a link to that under the Elseblog section in the sidebar of the main page here. There’s also an RSS feed for my shared and annotated list of, um, feeds, which, I suppose, you could then read in your own feed reader and share with others in your own feed … at which point the universe would collapse into a recursive feed hole, but I digress.
So, even if you don’t have Google Reader, you can follow along other items I’m reading and sharing by going to Three-Star Dave’s Shared Items (now with all-ninja action!) and see the stuff I think is worth reading but not quite worth actually doing a full blog post about.
I also link my G-shared items in my sidebar spotlight. Ironically, people who only read my blog on RSS will never see that link.
G-sharing is a fascinating new way to weave the threads of an online community. Hey! Look at this!…
Yes, oddly enough the emergence of RSS feeds has made blog design that much less critical. The emergency of Google’s shared post system has also had an impact, both in reducing some of the one-off posts that people would put on their blogs (while increasing the overall “sharing” of info), but also in reducing dialog (I get fewer comments here; instead, folks simply share the item in *their* shared GReader material, maybe with a prefixed comment; similarly, the current GReader sharing system doesn’t allow a *string* of comments, which feature I would very much like to see added to it).
I enjoy reading your shared items and your blog. I simply added your shared items to my RSS feed.
Which works great for those who do (or who browse primarily via RSS). For those who who don’t do the feed thing, I just wanted to point out an alternative source of Dave-vetted goodness.