Just in case, er, someone, is interested, I was reading Aubade by Philip Larkin for the nth time last night, just before I went to bed. Here it is. I don’t think this will land me in any trouble, copyright wise.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. 

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
– The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off, unused – nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Grim stuff indeed. Still, it’s one of my favourites in spite (because of?) this…

Steven Streight asks What is the Killer App for Blogs?

I wonder: has the killer app for blogs been realized yet?

What implementation of blogging holds the greatest promise for the future?

I really don’t think the perfect and ideal utilization of blogs is the digital diary.

Why? Because these are being abandoned, and the content in most cases is of little value or relevance to others. They are good therapy, personal expression outlets, but not the abode of great literary genius, in most cases.
…
I think there will be more blogs turning into, with much editorial refinement, books. Publishers will find it easy to discover new writing talent, see the blogger’s writing style right there on the screen.

Very interesting point about using blogs in the writing of a book. This is certainly a useful idea for non-fiction books. Using a blog is a great way of organising pieces of work and making them available to an audience of proof readers, as The Red Couch has proved. Not sure it will work the same way for fiction, though, which is a far more personal affair.

Interesting article on the BBC News site about blogging:

Weblogs started off as a personal outpouring, a kind of digital diary.

If you work on the basis that a problem shared is a problem halved, you can share with millions and – who knows?

Now blogs feature everything from cant on cars, opinions on opera, to rants from the politically righteous East and West.

But not everyone is free to say what they think.

Reporters Sans Frontières campaigns for the rights of journalists in China, where the ability to turn a nice phrase in criticism can be frowned on from a height.

In fact, the list of things you cannot talk about in China is almost as long as the things you can, as Cai Chongguo, a Chinese dissident, explains.

“We can’t talk about police or military corruption.

“And of course we can’t say anything about workers or farmer demonstrations. All that’s taboo.

“According to Reporters Sans Frontières, at least 63 bloggers have been arrested, and most of those are publishing articles outside of the country.

“These are people who are really resisting government oppression.”

I have been away for a few days over the Easter weekend. Normal service will be resumed today, hopefully…

From the BBC:

The dramatic rise in home internet access has failed to plug the communication gap between politicians and citizens, a new survey has found.
The survey, commissioned by Telewest Business, found that only 1% of people have contacted their MP via e-mail.

Nearly half of the 3,000 people interviewed had home net access and 38% said they would e-mail their MP if they knew their address.

But 50% did not even know who their local MP was.

Some have seen the the growth of home net access as a huge opportunity to create closer ties between the state and citizens as well as transforming how individuals communicate with each other.

But there is little evidence that this has happened.

In a separate study, conducted at Strathclyde University, it was found that access to the internet has failed to make people less cynical about the government and is not encouraging people to get involved in the political process.

Nearly a half (45%) of those interviewed for the Telewest E-Politics Study thought politicians should use the internet more and one in five of those interviewed said they would be more likely to vote if online voting was available.

Those aged 18-34 year-olds were the keenest on e-voting.

The results suggest a major rethink if politicians are to engage citizens using the net.

“The revelation that 45% thought MPs should use more internet communication demonstrates that government needs to evolve its communications infrastructure to meet this need,” said Christopher Small, director of public sector at Telewest Business.

Derek Wyatt was one of the first MPs to have a website and it is obvious to him that he should seek as many avenues as possible for talking to constituents.

“Any MP worth his or her salt would want a website and e-mail. It is natural to want to communicate as there could be a vote in it,” he said.

MPs are not obliged to have an e-mail address, despite the fact that they are all assigned one.

Some do not even hold surgeries – the traditional face to face way of keeping in touch with the people they represent in parliament.

Dr Stephen Ward, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, has spent the last six months analysing MPs websites and is not impressed with what he has found.

“Most offer just standard information and are essentially cyber brochures. Very few offer interactivity,” he said.

He believes most MPs are wary of direct dialogue with their constituents.

“Lots of MPs don’t want that dialogue and feel they haven’t got the time for it,” he said.

The few websites that did impress him were those that were updated on a daily or weekly basis or ones which laid out how a particular MP stood on a range of issues.

Mr Wyatt, who receives around 300 e-mails each day, confessed that many of them were related to very specific local issues but he relished the chance to get involved with the nitty gritty of constituents daily lives.

“In some ways, e-mail has changed the nature of my job. But I deal with everything because every vote counts. I contact the Chief Executive of the local council and magically everything is fixed,” he said.

The dialogue that e-mail opens up between MPs and citizens can also be used to promote a more general political agenda, he added.

Dr Ward believes more MPs, especially those in marginal constituencies, are seeing the value of e-mail to sway undecided voters.

“Some are starting to put e-mails they receive in databases. They know your interests and are able to respond a bit more scientifically,” he said.

From Scbole:

Diego wants off of my link blog

Diego doesn’t want me to republish his blog posts. So far he’s the third person to ask me to stop doing that on my linkblog. What do I do? Simply unsubscribe so that I don’t see their posts anymore and am not tempted to link to them.

I used to do just headlines but, personally, that format is useless.

Why do I do my linkblog? For several reasons:

1) New readers need a way to find new blogs. I don’t quote every post from someone’s blog, just the most interesting ones to me. Out of 3,500 posts I usually put 100 on my link blog.

2) As a store for me to do my own searches later on. If I only had headlines in my RSS feed this would be useless. Instead, now, I have a way for me to find things that I found interesting months later.

3) As a way to get traffic and search engine juice to the people I find interesting. One link from this blog is worth quite a bit of Page Rank. Why? Because a lot of people link to it. Because of my publishing tool (Kunal Das wrote the tool, named OutlookMT).

4) It’s pretty clear after reading my linkblog for a while that everything there came from someplace else and every item links back to its original owner.

5) I’m doing this for people who are overloaded with information and want to keep up to date on what the tech blogosphere is doing. It’s a lot easier to read 100 items a day than 3,500.

How do I do this blog? I read all my feeds and anything I find interesting I drag over to a folder named “Blog This.” That item is automatically placed on my link blog.

I also greatly appreciate Matt Mullenweg. He’s donating the hosting and the back-end technology (it’s running on WordPress).

I do find it interesting that Diego finds my linkblog interesting to read. It’s interesting BECAUSE it has full-text reprints. If you want pure headline link blogs you can check those out on del.icio.us or bloglines. They simply aren’t as useful.

I have quoted his whole post. Seemed kind of appropriate.

The thing is, I can’t understand this attitude one bit. This sort of request really begs the question: why are you writing a blog? Jeez, most people would be delighted to have their stuff highlighted by Scoble, I know I was. It means you get a whole load of new readers, and lets you know you are on the right lines. At the end of the day, readers might not need to visit your blog to read that particular post, but, in general blog readers are an inquisitive lot and will visit your site and subscribe if they like what they see. So, if anyone wants to quote my witterings in full, in part or whatever, go right ahead!

More here and here.

My link blog also quotes in full, though I have to admit that I doubt many people ever see mine. Still, if anyone doesn’t like it, let me know.

I’ve always wondered about this…

UK professor concludes: cellphones don’t cause gas station fires

Maybe MythBusters isn’t a solid enough scientific authority for Connecticut state senator Andreas Stillman, who wants to ban the use of cellphones when you’re filling up your car, but a professor from University of Kent in the UK has decided to settle once and for all whether cellphones can cause gas station fires (technically he studied whether cellphones cause petrol station fires, but we’re pretty sure his research applies to the rest of the world). He studied all 243 gas station fires from the past 11 years that were supposedly sparked by cellphones and determined that not a single one was actually caused by a handset. The actual cause of most of these fires? Static electricity, which is what everyone who actually knows anything about this stuff has been saying all along.

Some good advice from Susan Mernit:

How to grow your (blogging) audience

The traffic to this blog has gone up in the past three months, and it’s surely at least in part a result of some things I consciously put into practice. So, in the interests of transparency and sharing, here are some best practices: Post consistently…

My link blog has now moved to Blogger. This is so I can use BlogJet to dump stuff to it quickly and easily – something I couldn’t do with the BlogLines blog.

This might be useful and worth checking out, from Renee Blodgett

Blogzine launches, which is New Communications Forum’s new bi-monthly online publication dedicated to exploring new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, (including blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, search marketing, etc.).

It aims to discuss the growing phenomena of participatory communications and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business and society at large.

Their first issue explores the evolution of new models for journalism, PR, brand marketing, and advertising, and a contribution from blogger Jeremy Wright.

Quite a few interesting posts by Steve Rubel on Micro Persuasion recently, which I am still catching up on.

Folksonomies Turn Chaos Into Information

eWeek: The new term “Folksonomy” has emerged to describe the potential for user-defined tags to organically develop structure out of what might appear to be chaotic collections of information. One of the uncertainties about tags is how they can fit together among various services and what meaning can be gleaned from the tags of a large mass of users.

I haven’t really had much involvement with tagging, on Flickr I rarely bother. But more and more sites seem to be emerging using this technology and maybe it’s time I gave it some consideration.

Get a Job in Blogging

Want to get paid for thinking about blogging? There are plenty of blogging related jobs available via indeed.com. And there’s even a feed to keep track of them. 

However unrealistic, I am going to have to do this. Having a job where I could just do this all the time? Great!

Great result for Forest today.Link below from the Guardian. More to follow when I get back online.

Championship round-up

Championship: Sunderland went top with a win over Coventry, as Wigan could only draw against Nottingham Forest.

I really can see us staying up now. In Megson we have the best manager in the division, and now things are tightened up a the back, when we get some of the injured players back, we should be in a strong position come the run-in.

I have been playing with Microsoft’s OneNote (guessed at URL) software. It’s huge for what is for me just a Notepad replacement! At the moment I am just using one of the many possible screens to record notes and URLs I might want to visit in the future. It certainly offers a bit more flexibility than good old Notepad and makes a very useful scratchpad. Will post further should I actually do anything more with it…

Jason Kottke writes on: My business influences

As you may have noticed by reading the site in the past year, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about companies…how they succeed, why they fail, how to approach them from a holistic sense so they make sense on a human scale and not just from a business perspective, that sort of thing. In deciding to start my own little company of one, here are a few things I’ve run across that have influenced how I’m approaching it.

…

I don’t have many heroes, but Craig Newmark is definitely one of them. He’s had offers to sell craigslist for millions of dollars, many offers from VCs, he could charge for all listings on the site, or he could fill the site with advertising, but this is what he wants out of craigslist (via Wired): “get yourself a comfortable living, then do a little something to change the world”. The many articles I’ve read about Craig have really reinforced for me that you need to let your values drive business decisions and not the other way around.

I’ve mentioned this a few times on the site before, but Ludicorp, the makers of Flickr, has the one of the best quotes about business I’ve ever read on their about page. It’s an excerpt from Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus:

Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

…

Dave Eggers gets a lot of crap, but I like the way he’s trying to run McSweeney’s:

But the way that McSweeney’s is run is, “Can there be a way that what they call mid-list authors, people who don’t sell in the Danielle Steel category, can still have an audience and still make a living?” McSweeney’s has very little overhead, to the degree that we can sell 6,000 copies of somebody’s book, and he can still get a decent amount of money, because he’s getting more per book because of the low overhead. That’s still our goal. I was just sort of going along with the same business model, like, “If we sell 50,000 copies, then everyone will do fine, and life will stay quiet.”

Not trying to take over the world, just doing something in balance with the lives of everyone concerned.

…

There are lots more people other there doing wonderful things with their business lives (37signals, the independent Mac developers like Ranchero, Delicious Monster, and Panic, etc.) but that’s enough for now.

From Ken Leebow: Blogging 101 From Website101

http://website101.com/RSS-Blogs-Blogging/index.html
Website101 offers over 30 articles on blogs, RSS Feeds and how to use them to enhance your business. If you know someone who is a new to the world of blogs, this site could be very useful.

Haven’t had a chance to look at this yet, am working offline, but will definately look these up.

Only just come across this, from The Guardian’s Newsblog. Bizarre…

Slough Tory sacked

Assiduous readers may recall our story revealing that the Conservatives’ prospective parliamentary candidate for Slough, Adrian Hilton, believed the EU was part of a Catholic conspiracy to impose Vatican hegemony on Britain. Well, last night Michael Howard sacked him….

So now Ask Jeeves have produced a Firefox compatible toolbar. So when will Google get round to it? 

Buzz Marketing with Blogs discusses Google’s AdSense programme. Am surprised at this: 

I was all set to tell you about Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in New York who just publicly posted his exact Google AdSense revenue figures for the year.  He made $500, he says, and he’s got charts to back it up!

This is notable not because for the grand total, but rather because Google’s AdSense Terms of Service prohibit any discussion of click through rates or payments—a stance that has long aggravated many naturally chatty bloggers.

How the hell did he manage to make that much? I have some AdSense adverts over at Palimpsest and have so far managed to make about 20p.

Just been reordering all my Bloglines feeds in FeedDemon. On Bloglines I had kept them all on the ‘top level’ and not sorted them into folders, but that method makes things far too unwieldy when working offline. So, I have chosen the following categories:

• Computers & Internet
• Blogging
• General
• News and Sport
• Politics
• Books

Obviously the ‘General’ one is a bit of a catch-all, but surprisingly it doesn’t have that much in it at the moment…

The second Chapter of the blogging book being written on a blog is here.It was actually posted 5 days ago, but have only just had the chance to have a look at it.

My first comment is that I’m not sure at all about the title – Souls of the Borg.It sounds like a ghost written Star Trek novel or something. I guess it’s a pretty appropriate title, but for the average executive, a geeky reference like this may well be off-putting.

Still,it’s full of fascinating stuff about life within Microsoft.

If there is a Microsoft blogging policy, it would be those two words: “Blog Smart.” Its author is unknown, but it seems to be the perspective of the bloggers we encountered. There is a general sensethat at least so far, management is trusting bloggers to behave as responsible employees, and employees sense that the longer they can keep an open blogging policy the more unlikely that it will ever be shut down. They argue that by blogging they have an important competitive advantage over companies that don’t allow open employee blogging. What is even more important, they argue, is that blogging lets them get closer with their customers.

It’s all good stuff, except for that damn title…