As the Worm Turns

Three things.

First, updated RSS feeds:

I have changed over to Feedburner to burn my feeds. The little orange doohicky on the right of the navigation bar now says “Feedburner” instead of “RSS”, and it points to a different url. You can subscribe to comments, also. I changed over just because it’s what the cool kids are doing.

To be clear: I have no idea what the hell difference this makes. I don’t even really know what “burn a feed” means, I don’t know where they come from and I don’t know where they go. I have a feed aggregator (I think). It tells me when blogs with intermittent posting schedules have something new, and then I go to the site and read the new post. It saves me time ‘cos I don’t have to go to every individual blog to check. But don’t ask me how it works. And don’t ask me why anyone would read a post in the feed aggregator itself. That seems boring.

So, if changing things has made life difficult for anyone foolish enough to subscribe to this pretend blog — I don’t know what to tell you. Serves you right: you should be reading a book rather than wasting your time on the interweb.

Second, general tweaks:

I am slowly altering the site to fit my own aesthetic criteria. Mostly by removing the stock header images and replacing them with my own. But if I break anything and the site goes down — again with the point about ‘reading books’ and ‘wasting time on the blago-net.’ Really, you have better ways to spend your time than reading this drivel.

Third, more on why blogging is bad:

Here’s a guy who agree with me:

In the Web 2.0 world, however, the nightmare is not the scarcity, but the over-abundance of authors. Since everyone will use digital media to express themselves, the only decisive act will be to not mark the paper. Not writing as rebellion sounds bizarre… But one of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 future may well be that everyone is an author, while there is no longer any audience.

Andrew Keen doesn’t see the web-o-sphere as empowering; he sees it as producing narcissists. He lays out his argument in this article, he blogs here, you can listen to him on NPR here, and he has a book you can buy here. (Sidenote: the only good thing about the internet are hyperlinks. I wish everything came with hyperlinks.)

I may have a longer post about this in the future. But I may not — I might read a book instead.