I’ve now officially entered NaNoWriMo, which is an annual challenge to write a 50,000 word novel over 30 days. It kicks off on 1 November, which is one day away for me. I checked into the official NaNoWriMo website tonight and I was surprised to see that 14 other people from Wellington in New Zealand … Read more

I’m one of those people that regularly says: “One day, I’m going to write a novel.” Well now may be my chance. NaNoWriMo is a an annual challenge to write a novel in 30 days, over the month of November. The novel must be at least 50,000 words, which is about 175 pages. I discovered … Read more

I posted this on my linkblog, but I feel like publishing it here too. I heard some of Rautavaara’s Symphony Number 7 (Angel of Light) a few weeks ago, for the first time, and I was quite taken by the music. It reminded me of The Matrix. So anyway tonight I googled Rautavaara and discovered … Read more

I judge the quality of a weblog by its IDEAS, but it seems some people equate quality with popularity. Is the ‘culture of celebrity’ that afflicts Western movies, television and radio creeping in to weblogs as well? These thoughts were prompted by the recent weblog discussion on power laws and how they relate to weblogs. … Read more

The Two-Way Web is a very simple concept. It’s all about normal everyday people having a publishing platform on the Web. Sounds reasonable to me, but a thread on Many-to-Many this week has complicated the issue. Here’s my summary, based on how I first discovered and then tracked the thread (the process somehow seems important … Read more

David Weinberger recently wrote a weblog post entitled When blogs get really popular. In it he states that the line between blogging and email will become blurred. He says: “The word “blog” will expand to cover any linkable posting (a place) where a person gets to speak her mind more than once. If it’s more … Read more

Thanks to Peter Lindberg, for pointing me and others to a couple of Marshall McLuhan articles. But before I talk about those, here’s an overview of Marshall McLuhan from the Wikipedia: “Famous for coining the phrases “The medium is the message” and “the global village,” McLuhan was one of the early purveyors of the sound … Read more

I’ve been threatening to write an article about XHTML for a while now and so here goes. I’ll also talk about CSS and table-less web designs, because in the Web world right now XHTML and CSS are as hot a couple as Ashton and Demi (who may’ve broken up now, but I couldn’t think of … Read more

October 15, 2003 I read with interest Matt Haughey’s essay Blogging for Dollars, where he relates his experiences running Google’s Adsense adverts on his TiVo-focused weblog, PVRblog. Matt is making a pretty penny running the Google ads on his TiVo blog and one of the main reasons why is that it is focused on a … Read more

I’ve just finished transferring a bunch of links from Outlook to my linkblog. They are links I’ve been hoarding over the past few months, as ideas for future weblog articles or just for inspiration. I plan to use my linkblog to store all the ideas I harvest from the Web. Beats emailing myself, plus because … Read more

I’ve just returned from 4 days holiday. I was disconnected from the Web for the entire time. This was a good thing, as I spent lots of quality time with my family. Now I’m back sitting in front of my PC at home. I’ve spent the last hour reviewing stuff in my RSS Aggregator. But … Read more

I’ve been playing around with some linkblog solutions. Firstly, on Phil Pearson’s advice I tried del.icio.us. Once I negotiated my way around the minimalist design and even more minimalist documentation, I liked del.icio.us. However the problem is that it’s a 3rd party hosted service and I want to host my linkblog on my own server. … Read more

Too. Much. Information. Data floods my mind and my actions become water-logged. What to do? There’s too much to do. Information washes over me, my head is submerged. Metadata fills my nostrils. I’m drowning, help! I’m being melodramatic 🙂 But actually I do feel this way sometimes. Right now I am struggling to manage my … Read more

I’ve been thinking about starting a linkblog, like Phil Pearson has just done. Two of my favourite daily reads are Anil Dash’s Daily Links and Erik Benson’s Morale-o-Meter. Both those guys post a daily list of external links, with a 1-2 line comment on each link, which pretty much align with my own interests. Personally … Read more

September 30, 2003 2003 has so far been a year of hype for weblogs and k-logs. Blogging is on the cusp of the mainstream. Or is it? A few posts recently have me wondering: why would normal people want to publish to the Web? Mark Pilgrim: “… its possible that an unfiltered… unedited… personal publishing … Read more