From AdAge.com:
Seth Godin: My goals in blogging are:
- To spread ideas
- To put my ideas out there and get them out of the way of the next idea
- To encourage people to add alacrity to their diet
I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn’t increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.
Hence, the compromise on daily.
The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren’t distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.
Interesting. Is this another call to simple, rural living?
it’s snowing… i totally forgot to make a run on the grocery store for bread and milk… how am i going to survive a southern blizzard?
// watched high fidelity the other night… i want to be a record store owner… do record stores still exist?
discuss.
My flavorite coffee den is Firestorm Cafe (but it’s not open in the mornings… and there’s no Caribou coffee in the area… … there’s Izzy’s, but it’s not on the bus route to the office and if I hiked over there for me daily brew I’d late for work… The Drip in actually on the bus route to the office, but if i stopped for coffee i’d have to wait 30 minutes for the next bus which would make me late to work… and there’s City Bakery, but that presents the same dilemma as The Drip… leaving me with Starbucks and the bad taste in my mouth that Asheville’s public transit is not as good as it could be.). So, ugh (I can’t believe it!)… I concede… Starbucks (at least for me morning dose of caffeine).
// somedays i fantasize that i’m a reviewer for the new york review of books… all day long i read engaging books and write elaborate book reviews… and then i wake up and realize most people don’t read engaging books… nor literary criticism… i’m such an anachronism.
News-gathering is expensive. (Read previous posts on this theme here (The (read) sky (between) is (the) falling (lines)) and here (Pornographers don’t sell pornography).) That’s why I present this from Simon Dumenco for AdAge.com:
“unlike Salon, which… pays for its content, HuffPo [HuffingtonPost] has an ethically questionable content-generation scheme: It doesn’t pay most of its bloggers at all. Worse, it sometimes even lifts content wholesale from other sites that do pay for their own content…” (http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=133541)
browsing through a copy of The American Poetry Review and Poetry (both arrived yesterday) while drinking a big cup coffee.
just finished watching a couple episodes of Marty Stouffer’s Wild America with the kidlingers
Book blogs are the enemy of reading. I discovered several such fascinating blogs this year and spent hours enamored of reading, listing the books I wanted to read, and reading others’ lists. Imagine my surprise when I realized that I had frittered away precious reading time staring at a computer screen. Apparently I was getting all the warm, fuzzy, readerly feelings without the commitment of turning pages. Sad. (via brilynne)1
NOTES:
1) brilynne, “Reading 2008,” December 31, 2008, briary.blogspot.com, accessed January 1, 2009, https://briary.blogspot.com/2008/12/reading-2008.html
listening to the wind pull the barn door off its hinges.
I’m embarrassed to say that since college… I’ve been so busy speechwriting for Kerry and then Barack that I haven’t been reading all the good literary stuff I used to read…
~Jon Favreau
NOTES:
1) Mark Warren, “What Obama’s 27-Year-Old Speechwriter Learned From George W. Bush,” Esquire, accessed December 20, 2008, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a5339/barack-obamas-speech-writer-1208/
From BlogAsheville:
Many local bloggers have neglected their blogs recently, with varying reasons/excuses.
So, do bloggers need a bailout too? No. Read Seth’s take on the personal blog demise:
There’s a difference between a blog about YOU… and a blog about the reader. Guy Kawasaki’s blog, and my blog for that matter, are not about us, about what we ate yesterday or how great we are. They are about you, the reader.
I guess there’s an easy analogy:
Your blog could be like a newspaper (written by a staff)
or it could be like a book (written by an author)
So, enough about me. How about you?
The point is not to show up on a list, the point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking.
i know, i know. my inbox is filling up. i left a book at a clients office. press proofs were delivered. and, yes, i will call you.
kidlinger calls and says, ‘when you coming home… i’m making chocolate chip pancakes.’ AWRsome! who needs to work when thar’s pancakes?
isn’t there something larger than a venti?
i think i saw every hour of the night. oh, insomnia, thy name is kidlings.
crazy, i can’t sleep, though it’s been a busy day. i’ll try reading a philosophy book on the topic of tradition which i just acquired.
you know you’re from wisconsin when you walk outside, it’s 29 degrees, and you tell those inside; “yeah, it’s a bit chilly this morning.”
(courtesy Adobe Illustrator Live Trace feature).
nothing better than a 2 mile hike in 20 degree weather to make me feel at home.
Coffeehouse Junkie 