Insist on yourself, never imitate.
Hard to believe that it’s been about 3 months since I started blogging. It’s been an enjoyable experiment. I’d read blogs for some time, but nothing gives you an appreciation for the technology or culture as diving into it yourself.
I’m relatively happy with the Tumblr platform:
Positives are that I can do multimedia posts easily including “re-bloging” of websites or links with my own comments. On the negative side, I haven’t been able to embed a search function (seem to be having trouble with any widgets that have javascript) and the “Archive” on the right column of the blog isn’t all that useful. Also, there are not really statistics built in, so the only way that I know how many people are reading are those that comment, email or subscribe either using the Feedburner button on the right or through Google Reader (and if you’re reading and haven’t subscribed, please take a moment and click the button - here’s my old post on subscribing).
What most people in technology tend to forget is that the number of people who truly understand all of the bells and whistles of any program or system is very limited. When it comes to computers, applications and websites, there is so much information and so much new functionality coming out, that it is impossible for anyone to keep up. When I find something especially cool, I try and share it and thanks to friends and coworkers, I’ve seen plenty of hot trends before they got really big (not that I’ve made money on this knowledge). One of the main reasons that I started this blog was not to examine large trends like “Web 2.0”, but to share little tips or shortcuts that I’ve run across (and if you haven’t noticed, I tend to do a lot of linking - something that I picked up from years of reading Bill Simmons in the pre-blog years).
I think it comes down to this: you can either make something simple, or spend a lot of time trying to hide complexity. The good news is that some companies “get-it”. Mozilla’s Firefox browser is an example that I think fit this definition. Firefox’s tabbed browsing, auto-filling of urls and large number of available plug-ins/widgets has allowed it to take some sizable market share away from Microsoft Internet Explorer (I haven’t had a chance to take a look at the new Google Chrome browser, but am a fan of lots of other Google tools). On my browser most days I have a tab open with Google Reader, a tab for Meebo (IM web app integrated with Firefox so that I don’t need a separate application and it also runs all IM clients in one browser) and Twitterfox (find it by going Tools/Add-Ons from Firefox) - a Twitter widget that alerts when there are updates so that I almost never need go to the Twitter site.
So, I hope you’ve found something useful in my ramblings and thanks for coming along for the ride,
Stuart Miniman
PS - the quote in the title of this post is Emerson.
