When blogs "go dark", which is to say, when there isn't much in the way of posts by the poster, you know that they are far too busy to actually write something.

But there is more to it then that.

They usually hold themselves up to this impossibly high standard that makes it near impossible to actually squeeze out en entry.

Which sucks. Cause a lot of my favourites have gone dark—including my own. So I am going to try and lighten up my standard, which is impossible to live up to when you are as buy as I am. For the next little while, expect to see more light-hearted entries, and entries a little less wordy.

2 Excellent friends of mine are blogging, the first is the Pastor of Disaster, your vicar and mine, The Reverend. His personal site is at Anima Corporis, and uses it to publishes some excellent erotic fiction. Along with The Reverend, we have the Auspicious Kitty, talking about Yoga and Buddhism.

The Auspicious Kitty seems to be starting out her blogging experience in more of a journalistic way talking about her journey through yoga, in her blog appropriately titled Progress or non-process. Normally, I am quite hard on journal-style blogs, but this is quite cool. The difference between this and a Live Journal? Simple: there is a clear path being followed, a common thread to tie everything together, and the potential for other people to learn from her experiences. Live Journals are just a Brownian random walk through a teenage wasteland.

The Reverends blog (Observations is its title) on the other hand is more of a random walk about cool and interesting things, somewhat like my own blog. Because he is writing under a pen-name, he gets to be a little more open about things that I used to be open about, which is way cool. Check out his third entry on rights of passage. Tasty goodness.

I am very pleased to provide them with webspace, and hope they continue to blog away.

I'm feelin mighty chuffed. Yesterday, I blogged about a few SXSW podcasts I really enjoyed. And now, Boing-boing has done the same, but look at the dates.

So I pre-boinged instead of post-boinged. Which is to say, I wrote the same blog post as boing-boing before they did, rather then the other way around.

Normally when I write a blog entry, there are 2 ways that I can go about doing it, I can either slam out an entry in a matter of minutes or I can lovingly craft an entry over a period of what can sometimes be months. As you might imagine, there are problems with both styles.

When I am just slamming out an entry there are spelling and grammatical errors, and it is definitely not my best writing. This is usually because I am pressed for time, or I just want to get something out the door, mostly to say "Hello" to my readers, and let them know I am still alive. Something that is very important as I am pressed for time.

If I lovingly craft an entry, it is basically the exact opposite. Some of my best entries in terms of structure, grammar, and clarity have gone through multiple drafts and revisions. In fact, frequently I will start one of these entries and then finish them off 2 months later. They really are the cream of the crop.

The problem is, that neither style is working for me. I want the speed of option one, with the beauty of option 2. Where is my damn cake, and a fork to eat it with?

IDEA! Outlining...

Back in junior high, we were taught to outline our thoughts, before we wrote our paper. Very complex things—these outlines. First you have to make sure everything is indented properly, and your first level of indentation should be in Roman numerals, the next level uppercase letters... oh the structure! The problem with this method of outlining is that it isn't conducive to writing down thoughts as we think them. Mind Mapping is a great technique, but I don't want to pull out a scratch piece of paper every time I want to write a blog entry.

The thing is, that outlining is a really powerful technique of writing a blog entry (or essay, or book, or..) before actually writing it. It provides a focus and a structure. Because there is a clear delimiter of where the end goes, it is easy to write out an entry in a short span of time, and not get lost half way through, or run out of steam. As ideas come and go, the outline can be added to and subtracted, and there is an easily visible road map of what you are doing and where you are going.

Here is an example outline that I did for this entry (how wonderfully meta):

- what i did in past
  - slam one out real quick
    - spelling errors
    - not best writing
  - write revise write revise write revise
    - good writing, clear
    - takes forever, months even
- new idea with outlines
  - speed up entry writing
  - make writing clearer
  - outline using simple text - this one for example
  - see how it goes  - maybe publish more entries

I've already written this entry in half an hour, which isn't really that bad. Maybe I can end up publishing more entries and still maintain my extremely busy 2 job with family day. I guess we will just have to "see how it goes".

David Sirfy's State of the Blogosphere came out recently. What is interesting is that Dose picked up the story and ran with it. On the cover of one of their recent weeklies was the logo of the biggest and best blog search engine: Technorati, along with a full report on page 2 of David Sirfy's findings.

So big media, at least by Canadian standard as Dose is owned by one of the larger media companies in the country, has not only sat up and noticed blogging, but they have used a blog as the primary soruce of their information. This is all backwards. Blogs are supposed to generate their content from big media, not the other way around.

The other thing is that the Dose article mentions that Blogs are not going to be over-taking big media quite yet, because only 4 independent blogs are in the top 10 (or something). The thing is, blogs work on the Long Tail principle. Most good blogs appeal to a smaller number of people due to their topical nature. So while the overall trend is that the large media companies get more hits then Knitting and Kitty Blog X, Knitting and Kitty Blog X gets more hits from people into cats and/or knitting. Well that is my suspicion anyway. People who are into Knitting, The Iraq War, and Pervery will get an RSS feed of a few different knittingblogs, pornoblogs and warblogs, rather then hitting CNN. And this trend will continue. People are mixing up their own news sources, rather then turning to something "authoritative".

We've already seen some interesting things when blogging and big-media intersect. I suspect as blogs get bigger and better, this will only continue.

Something struck me while I was reading Sifry's Alerts: State of the Blogosphere (Feb 2006, Part 1). It wasn't what he was saying about the growing number of bloggers, nor was it the relationship between daily postings and newsworthy events. What got me was tags. It wasn't even the part about how tagging is on the rise, but rather the tags used to tag this particular blog posting:

Technorati Tags: blogosphere, blogs, blogsearch, postingvolume, posts, postvolume, pr, scaling, search, search engine, sotb, sotb2006, spam, spamblog, statistics, stats, tags, technorati, technoratijapan, technoratitag, weblog

What got me was the style that he used to tag his entries. Here is another set of tags from a different entry:

Technorati Tags: blogsearch, developer, employment, job, joboffer, joboffered, php, san francisco, technorati

See, if I were to tag either of those entries, my set of tags on the first entry would be: blog, search, postvolume, pr, scaling, search, sotb, 2006, spam, stats, tags, technorati, japan. the tags blogosphere, blogsearch, search engine, sotb2006, spamblog, statistics, technoratijapan and technoratitag are, in the way that I approach tagging, redundant and like weeds in my personal tag garden. Now this is not to say that the founder of Technorati doesn't know how to tag. It is just to say that our style of tag-gardening is different. I tag my blog entries for personal storage and retrieval. If I want to find all of the posts I made about my music, I would do a search on the tag intersection of "music" and "mine". If I want to talk about PHP jobs, I would search for the (currently hypothetical) intersection between php and jobs. I depend on tag intersections giving me the information I need. This allows me to do things like get a list of blog postings that I have done related to my creative output (musical, programming, artistic or otherwise) by hitting the tag mine. I can drill into, our out of tags as needed.

Now, the approach that Mr Sifry takes seems to be different. If I may venture a guess as to how and why he is tagging, I'll lay bets that he is tagging for the world around him. The overloading of terms (job, joboffer, joboffered) seems more intent on making an impression on a search engine (like technorati, for instance) rather then for personal organization. Given that his blog rating is at ranking 811, versus 574,635 (my own ranking) this makes sense.

So, how you tag depends on what you use tags for. I want to be able to collect and search my own material (photos, blog entries, bookmarks, etc.), and I find searching on tag intersections much more interesting and edifying, so I format my tags accordingly, and spend a lot of time pruning and taking care of my tag gardens. But it makes me wonder if the tag gardens I am growing are the most user friendly in the world.

Flagrant Disregard just made my RSS. Especially with this awesome entry titled Her teeth are the teeth of steel. John Watson is an excellent writer, and I only hope to one day match his skills in translating the mushy-goo-about-my-wife-and-daughter-inside-my-heart into such beautiful prose.

He also is a very competent and creative programmer, observe the FlickrToys. The Trading Card Maker is one of my favourites.