December 3, 2005
“open source blogging”: readers’ link page
A lot of people have been sending me links over the last couple of days. Thanks, Everybody.
The intensely frustrating part is, I simply don’t have time to write about them all. Which is a pity, as you have gone to all that trouble writing to me with some really good stuff. And this is something that has REALLY been bugging me for a while.
So I’m wondering is there any merit to this idea: Instead of you e-mailing me links in the hope of me posting them later [which is an inefficient and time-consuming process, let’s be honest], you go put them up on the wiki, with a one-or-two-sentence blurb about what the link is about, and we can all go look at them together?
These can either be links to your blog or somebody else’s. I’m not fussed either way. Though to be honest, I’d rather you link to specific blog posts and stories, rather than just you self-promoting your homepage.
The point of this exercise is to help drive traffic to more people’s blogs than my time-guzzling, conventional blogging style will allow. A lot of gapingvoid readers are writing great stuff, and I want to do a better job of helping to get the word out etc. If this idea works I might turn it into a regular feature down the line.
Let’s see what happens. Thanks.
[Go post on the wiki here.]
NB: If you find you have trouble using the wiki, then just post them in the comment section below. No worries.
[UPDATE:] The first wiki post leads us to here. Rock on.
[NOTE TO SELF:] This is your dumbest idea ever. Good job. Nice going.
ahum!
…sunday is the 4th of December!
it could start a new ne(a)t idea:
only alowed to e-mail, when cyberspace is hybernating*.
* cyberspace’s version of “when hell freezes over”.
I suggest that you syndicate a feed from del.icio.us and ask people to tag their bookmarks with the tag, “for:hughmcleod”. If you want to edit it to avoid spam and self-promotion, you could ask people to do that. Then, read through them. If it is worthy, you could tag it with “publicgapingvoid” and then syndicate the feed for the tag “/yourusername/publicgapingvoid”.
This may sound harder to a non del.icio.us user. But, there are a lot of del.icio.us users with this habit already.
Funny, I just clicked through your feed to make the same suggestion Pete made. Or something similar.
Hugh,
It sounds like you are in the classic situation of the small entrepreneur whose business is growing to the point that he can’t do everything personally. I know it will be considered blasphemy in the blogsphere, but what about getting some help? Perhaps a multi-layered blog where you serve as editor? The wiki idea is a good one, but I don’t think your readers will get the same “Hugh-experience” as your blog.
Just some thoughts …
Dave Wheeler
I was just about to chime in with Peter Caputa’s idea. It’s simpler for folks like me already tagging their links with del.icio.us.
Kevin Sites, now Yahoo! fame, has 3 folks back home helping him with research & editing while he’s on road blogging. Now I don’t have that staff, nor sounds like it you. But it’s more bloggy, opensourcey to ask my global factcheckers, researchers, editors (ha!!) to be my eyes & ears online for the tsunami anniversary live-blogging tour. Basically tag anything they read that may be revelant and I should take a peek at and weave into post with tsunami2005.
A few years back instead of hiring translators for Google’s website, they threw it out to their users and had a worldwide (volunteer) corp of translators. They fact-check each other by rating how “good” the translation is and the best one is used.
Why dumbest idea ever?