Blogaholics: How Robert Scoble Reads 1000 blogs a day

Using his aggregator to pull his information, he can then access it on his laptop, his cell phone, or even on his television. Yes, it seems it is with him no matter where he is (except perhaps when he is sleeping. We hope). Part of his strategy is to have an offline way to read them so he is not dependent on internet access. He can read them in the car or in the plane without problem.

His feeds are organized into folders, and those folders are organized alphabetically. He usually is methodical, reading top down. If he does not finish, he will go bottom up the next day. Only one main reading period per day.

The benefit of an aggregator is that it organizes the new posts in a “text river” showing you the titles and or content top down. You can pick and choose what you want to be as you scan it. Very easy. By scanning so many topics and feeds, how do you possibly decide what is worth while? You look for trends. That is the benefits of multiple feeds at this magnitude. You can spot the trends very early (can see x number of people on the same topic in a short time period) and talk about them yourself when the idea is still new.

If Scoble scans something he wants to read, he reads it. If it’s good, he will click through to the website itself or save it to his “Blog It” folder.

Iain Duncan Smith thinks blogging can help the Tories win the election!

For decades the national conversation in most western countries has been directed by a few talking heads. Newspapers play important roles but all the evidence suggests that broadcasters have possessed the greatest potential to frame public debate. British politicians have known that communicating their message depends upon getting the nod from a small number of powerful figures in the broadcast media.

The editor of BBC1’s six o’clock news bulletin can make a minister’s day by putting his department’s latest announcement at the front of the bulletin. Hearing Huw Edwards say something positive about that afternoon’s policy launch will even put a smile on Alastair Campbell’s face.

But all of this looks set to change because of the blogosphere. Blogging is a geeky expression for how people use online logs, or diaries, to share their opinions. If a weblog is interesting and informed enough it can reach millions of people at zero cost. Karl Rove, the man George Bush described as the architect of his re-election, recently said that the dominance of America’s mainstream media is coming to an end. And Rove credits the Davids of the blogosphere for the humbling of the old media Goliaths. After decades of centralisation, Rove believes that the national conversation is being democratised.

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Bloggers will rescue the right

From the Common Craft blog:

1. Write what you know. Everyone is an expert in a small number of things.
2. Listen. The mythology of blogging is about putting things into the world, but the other part of that is hearing the world- listening. Listen, then write. If you run out to the world with your message without listening, you have a good chance of being wrong.
3. Link often. You owe it to your readers to link to others. Doing lots of linking is likely the single best way to get readers.
4. Post often. Like many things, the way to get good is to practice, plus more posts means more readers.
5. Correct yourself. Bloggers are different when we’re wrong, we can undo the damage when we publish. We can react in a way that makes it better.
6. Generalize. Almost everything starts more general and moves to specific.
7. Flame judiciously. One of the things that gives conversation flavor is anger. He sees no reason not to share your feelings. Reasonable people never change the world.
8. Spell-check. The quality matters, though Marc Canter disagrees, so does Jeremy Wright.
9. Look good.
10. Balance hubris and humility- arrogance smells- it stinks and drives readers away.
11. Be Brief. It’s hard to write a short entry
12. Be intense. A cool, dispassionate narrow tone, almost never works.
13. Don’t tell secrets. The blogosphere is not a million writers, it’s a million listeners. If you post something secretive, people will know, like high school- except the web never forgets.
14. Don’t ruin your life. There are a lot of ways you can get in trouble. The question is, why is the media writing about people getting fired for blogging? Think they are worried?
15. Don’t blog on command. People shouldn’t be pushed to blog. The people that should blog will blog.
16. Late add: Be sincere
17. Late add: Never Lie
18. Late add: Write for pleasure

Continuing the coverage of his new novel, Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro is interviewed in today’s Observer.

From his semi-detached house in suburban Golders Green, in north London, Kazuo Ishiguro has made himself an architect of singular, self-enclosed worlds. His writing traps us inside strange skulls. He spends, he says, around five years on each of his books and the first couple of these years, each time, involves little circumnavigations of the imaginative space of his novel, marking boundaries, testing structures, making himself at home. All of his quietly unsettling, intimate vantages have foundations in the voices that narrate them and he spends a good deal of time, too, ‘auditioning’ these voices, listening to different possibilities, before he settles on one.

John Self reviews Never Let Me Go on Palimpsest here.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel Never Let Me Go comes weighted and freighted with anticipation, particularly for me. As you know from the above I don’t believe any of his books would rate less than four-and-a-half out of five on some notional scale nicked from Amazon. Never Let Me Go continues that tradition, though I found in the end it was closer to the four side of four-and-a-half than some of the others…

BBC has an article along similar lines to those I mentioned here.

“If a friend is excited about a concert and that gives me an idea for a birthday gift, I will store the info on e-mail,” says Georges Harik, the man in charge of search-engine Google’s Gmail service.

Stuart Anderson, Microsoft’s Hotmail business manager in the UK, keeps online shopping receipts in his mailbox in case he has to query anything later.

“People are keeping a lot more information in their e-mail accounts for retrieval at a later date,” says Yahoo!

Web-based e-mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL Mail on the Web are becoming databases by default as a growing number of people use them, to store data and photos so they can retrieve them from anywhere.

From the Guardian today:

“I try to stay in the moment,” Frank Rijkaard says quietly as he studies the thick cloud of smoke hanging over his head. “Whether the moment is one of joy or difficulty or just sitting here right now, in my office, talking to you, I always think it’s best to stay in the moment. You know what I mean?”

Rijkaard takes a big drag, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs, staring quizzically at me through narrowed eyes. He exudes the kind of cool nonchalance that makes you wonder if he’s making a profound existential point or simply relishing his latest fag in the long chain he lights in his dingy office in the bowels of Camp Nou. He’s smart enough to do both.

Guardian Unlimited Football | News | Big interview with Frank Rijkaard

The Guardian profile Kazuo Ishiguro today.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s early career set a modern benchmark for precocious literary success. Born in 1954, in 1982 he won the Winifred Holtby award for the best expression of a sense of place, for his debut novel A Pale View of Hills . In 1983, he was included in the seminal Granta best of young British writers list, alongside Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain and Pat Barker. Three years later his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, picked up the Whitbread book of the year and in 1989 his third, The Remains of the Day, won the Booker. David Lodge, chair of the judges, praised the depiction of a between-the-wars country-house butler’s self-deception as a “cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance”, which succeeds in rendering with “humour and pathos a memorable character and explores the large, vexed theme of class, tradition and duty”. At 34, Ishiguro’s place in the literary firmament was already secure and he felt as if he’d only just begun.

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Profile: Kazuo Ishiguro

After The Wasp Factory, which shouldn’t last much longer than this evening, I am going to have a crack at this:

Some good Palimthoughts from the ever reliable Self here.

No comment required.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Sex hungry roaches lured to death

Synthetic sex pheromones are being developed as an ingenious way of luring randy cockroaches to their deaths.

Smarties to come in hexagonal tubes? Whatever next?

BBC NEWS | Business | Smarties set to lose their tube

I only managed to figure out last night how to get Firefox to open multiple tabs on startup, each with a different page loading. And guess what? It was very simple to do.

Simple set your tabs up as you want at startup, and go to options and click ‘set as home page(s)’ It’s that little ‘s’ in parenthesis that’s important. Next time you start Firefox up, all the pages load.

Mine now starts with:

• Palimpsest
• Gmail
• Bloglines
• This blog

One issue with this is that everytime you hit the home page button on the browser toolbar, all four pages start loading in new tabs, meaning that you can end up with rather a lot of them!

John O’Farrell on the dearth of English players in the Premiership, following Arsenal’s all-foreign efforts this week:

This week, another football landmark was reached when a Premiership team fielded an entire squad of foreign players. “What is Arsene Wenger doing?” said the pundits. “I mean, OK, so Arsenal are 4-1 up, but they completely lack the homegrown talent of their opponents … Oh, hang on, now they’re 5-1 up.” In fact, it should have been six but we’re stuck with these useless English referees. “Where oh where are the top British players?” asked a fan at half time, sensing that he vaguely recognised the bloke serving him a reheated hotdog.

From The Guardian:

The last time Nottingham Forest and Tottenham Hotspur met in the FA Cup, it was the 1991 final. Wembley was filled with Puffa jackets, videos were set for Saturday-night favourite Noel’s House Party, and Cher’s Shoop Shoop Song poured out of the stadium speakers. If that doesn’t date the scene, maybe this will: it was expected to be a close game – and it was. With Spurs losing Paul Gascoigne after 14 minutes, Forest were only undone by a fatal error from Des Walker, who headed beyond his own keeper in the 94th minute.

On Sunday they meet again, this time in the fifth round. And this time, it’s a different kind of fatality paling Forest cheeks. Even the most optimistic daren’t entertain the notion of a win at White Hart Lane. In fact, when Spurs met West Brom in the fourth-round replay to decide who would face Forest, John Motson said it all: “Whoever wins here will host Nottingham Forest in the next round, so there’s the prospect of a good cup run here.”

Onfolio seems pretty cool at the moment. Here’s how the feed of this blog looked on it just now (click for larger image):

It seems to integrate pretty seamlessly with Firefox, too. Just click a toolbar button to bring up the sidebar to read feeds, hit another one to subscribe to whatever you are browsing. It’s pretty good, and I’d recommend it.

One of the frustrations of not sticking with FeedDemon was that I forgot to export my blogroll so I could update Bloglines with all the cool feeds I had come across. Frustrating.

So I could start pulling some together, I had a look through Robert Scoble’s blogroll. It’s huge! Lots of good stuff on here, though, I’ve subscribed to loads.

Have used the free blog available on Bloglines to set up a link blog. Basically for stuff that catches my eye and I might want to see later, but which I can’t be bothered to comment on properly over here.

One thing I would like to have in my ideal blogging tool is a client that sits on my PC, enabling me to write posts and things, which could then be uploaded when I connect to the internet. WordPress doesn’t offer this, sadly, but given that I spend all day at work, where I can’t install software anyway, it’s academic. Oh, to work from home!

Anyway, I have come up with a modest solution, which is to have a Notepad file open all the time called ‘blognotes’. I type in my posts as I think of them, along with the time that I wrote it. It’s then a case of copying and pasting them into WordPress when I get the chance, altering the timestamp as necessary.

This also has the advantage that posts get reviewed, which means I don’t end up posting something really stupid. Possibly. One thing I have noticed though, is that when copying and posting from Notepad, turn off word wrap before you do it (from the Format menu). Otherwise your line breaks can go a little crazy.

I am really getting settled down now with the various systems I have put together. I really like using gmail for, duh, my email, and the Yahoo! calender is coming in very handy. I am pretty confident, having thought about it, that I am going to put the webmail notes hack into place, and of course I really like WordPress as a blog engine, and am settled into Bloglines for my RSS feeds for now.

The only difficulty with all of this is the fact that none of it is available without a PC. I really need to get some sort of handheld device, if only to take notes and things whilst offline. But even better would be if I could email, access my calender and post to here from an online PDA type device. Is this possible? I don’t know much about them. Plus, I haven’t any money for this kind of thing. Perhaps I should just forget about it all…

10.15 Am now on page 132 of The Wasp Factory now, roughly the half-way point. It isn’t getting any more normal! Banks’ writing, though, is superb. He keeps it full of dark suspense, and the black humour is hilarious and horrific. I wanted to read this partly because I knew it to be somewhat macabre and it certainly hasn’t disappointed. I can imagine it being a book I would want to re-read, though obviously not exactly for pleasure…