Lotsa news. Too much to post right at the moment. Biggest news? I've changed Providers. Hopefully the blog should be a little quicker. It will be even more quicker when I learn how to re-enable image caching. That comes later.

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.

Ze Frank is running a naked funding drive for his video blog The Show. Give him a little bit of money, and he gives you a tiny jewl icon. A little more money, and you get a little ducky. 50 bones nets you a huge MONSTOR duck. The here are the first results of the (well deserved) nekkid cash grab. Look for the little jewels that refer to themselves and their neighbors.

Update:(the title for this entry refers to two "the show"'s that feature a mini feature-ette (segmentette?) watch here and watch here)

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.

Looks like comments are wonky. I've been trying to reply to a comment in an earlier entry and it just won't work. So... Umm.. stay tuned?

Update: The comments are fixed. I got this horrible mysql error:

myisamchk: error: Key in wrong position at page 6144
- check records and index references
myisamchk: error: Keypointers and record positions doesn't match
MyISAM-table 'serendipity_comments' is corrupted

I did a table dump, renamed the old table out of the way (as a backup) and a restore, and it seems to have fixed the problem. 'course it would be nice to figure out what happened in the first place.

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.