Oh, and you saw the teaser trailer, right?

/via Coudal Partners.

“I don’t get to say this often: it’s a perfect execution.”

Though I have purchased books I have yet to purchase or subscribe to a magazine or newspaper on the iPad. Ryan’s praise for The Economist may change that.

I just did something I’ve been waiting months to do. I purchased Reeder for Mac from the App Store.

It isn’t very often that I am so anxious to pay for something that I have been using for free. In fact, I can’t remember any other application that I’ve wanted to purchase more than Reeder for Mac. For months I’ve been using Reeder for Mac’s “beta” builds and they have progressed steadily and swiftly from a pretty good application to an indispensable one. Its workflows are so well refined that it allows me to accomplish a task that – at one point in my life – used to take hours and hours of my time each day. With Reeder for Mac I’m able to keep up-to-date with everything going on in my world in only minutes per day instead of hours. I’m able to use the same workflows no matter which device I happen to currently be on because I use Reeder on my Mac, my iPad and my iPhone. In fact, I simply can not imagine owning a Mac, iPad or iPhone without having Reeder installed.

I suppose I’ve wanted to pay for the application for so long because I’ve wanted to put my money where my mouth was and to finally pay tribute to those that have worked so hard on it. To provide them with the resources they need to keep the application in existence and, dare I say, improve it. I’m really looking forward to the future of these applications.

So, I guess it goes without saying that I recommend you pick up Reeder for Mac too. Oh, and for iPad. Oh, and for iPhone. You’ll thank me later.

And for the past few years I think this has settled down a little. The standards those few pioneers set in the beginning are still around. Most blogs today have a fairly similar feature-set and layout. Even when the layout is dramatically different than the status quo the feature-set is still just about the same.

I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.

Several rather new trends are appearing in the pro blogosphere that started only a few years ago but are now becoming the new pro blog recipe. These trends simply weren’t there 7 or even 5 years ago. Disabling comments is seems to be the main dish (though 4 years ago it was debated). Having a podcast on-the-side is the side-dish. Add to that some sponsorship opportunities in RSS feeds, and a sprinkling of an ad network to taste, and you’ve got yourself the modern day pro blog recipe. Actually, all you really have is a direct mirror of what John Gruber has put together with Daring Fireball – but, nonetheless, these are the trends among pro bloggers and these must be taken into consideration when coming up with a brand new blog format that could set the trend for the next few years.

Syndication has also changed. It seems just yesterday that people thought full-content RSS feeds would destroy their ability to make money blogging. It turns out that could possibly be the most profitable part of their blog’s business model.

Having a Twitter account for your blog, or simply being selective with what is tweeted from your blog (which is my current model), is where things may very well be shifting. Today it would be unthinkable to see sponsored tweets in amongst the links to posts but give it a few years. Today’s Twitter feed is yesterday’s RSS feed. I imagine there will be sponsored tweets too and, in the near future, people will be just fine with that.

Exclusive, paid-for email newsletters had a spike earlier this year with a few services launching and some key figures in the industry taking a stab at them. I have no inside information on how those are turning out – but there is reason to believe that the blog could also do with some exclusive, paid-for content. It may not work for your blog about Hobbit-lore but perhaps it’d work for an incredibly good cooking, investing advice, design-and-code-tutorial, or architecture exam review blog.

Something I’ve always had issue with is that there aren’t enough “home pages” on blogs. That is why the home page for my site is my about page rather than a reverse chronological list of posts as most blogs are. I have that page too but people landing directly on cdevroe.com should not be introduced to my website by only seeing the latest few posts I’ve written. It wouldn’t be a very good introduction and, very well, may not even represent what my blog is about. Because this is a personal blog and not a blog about any one topic, the latest few blog posts would be a very bad representation about what this site really is – a personal blog.

Most blogs that try to earn a buck want to put as many clickable items on their home pages as possible. They probably feel that if they didn’t you’d never go anywhere besides the home page. I can say, after pouring over the stastics of my home page, that isn’t true. A fair percentage of the people that have come to my home page have stayed on that page for a few moments (presumably reading the page) and subsequently clicked on the blog or diet page(s), done a search, or gone to my Twitter account. All good things. I hope that someone solves this issue in a much better way than I have because I really do believe there is a lot of room for improvement here.

Advertising on blogs has simply never worked well. Yes, publishers have made money. Yes, advertisers have increased sales by purchasing ad space on blogs. However, for the core-subscribers to a blog the ads are just noise. Ad networks like The Deck do a very good job at striving to keep a higher quality product by controlling the ads and how they are displayed. But, arguably, even at that level of curation we still just end up with an ad in a sidebar on a blog. I wish there was a better answer for making content “free” to blog subscribers but – at present – advertising is our mule.

Some people claim the trackback is dead. I don’t believe that to be true. In fact, I rather like trackbacks. I like when blogs show me what others have written about a particular blog post. I like them even better than comments. Perhaps if blog software, and the theme of a blog, used the optional excerpt of the trackback standard better they’d work much more like comments (and be much more valueable) than they do now.

Reblogging, Retweeting, Sharing/Liking on Facebook, etc. are all ways to have a post be spread outside of a blog’s audience. The modern day word of mouth. There is no doubt that these tools work very well for some blogs while on others they do nothing. I have these options on my blog and, while I do get a few people using them per day, they serve little purpose then to remind people that if they’d like to share the post they can do it quickly and easily. But in reality, if a post is simply too good not to pass on it will be passed on whether you have a big Facebook button on your blog or not. These tools aren’t going anywhere in fact they are going to become even more ubiquitous – but it’d be nice if someone with an ounce of taste figured out a way to make these options pretty as well as easy to use and, as a hat-trick, much more valuable to all parties involved.

I know, I know, I’m going on and on about this but all of the above is just the tip of the iceberg as to why I believe that the blog format is ripe for someone to really begin innovating again. We have all of the tools and over a decade’s worth of content – all we need are some pioneers.

/via Gus Mueller.

A few years ago I made it a goal to read a book a month for a year. I did OK. I didn’t reach my goal but I found time to read a fair number of books and had a great time doing it.

But now I’m finding it hard to get through a single book, or even a few chapters of a book. I find it especially hard to read long form on the iPad. With a flick of my fingers I can check Twitter, Facebook, my email, CNN.

Most books have rough parts. Parts that drag, lull, or seem to slow way down. You expect it. And when I came to these parts in past I would simply power through them. But now, if I find even a few sentences in a row that do not keep my attention I feel like I should move on, close the book, and read something else.

OK. We get it. We are probably all suffering from this trend. So how am I going to conquer it? Simple; practice. I’m going to retrain my attention span. I’m going to sit down with something – a book, a project, maybe even some time for meditation – and spend 30 minutes with it. Then, I’ll progress from there.

For whatever reason this hasn’t really affected my work or my personal research projects. I’m guessing that deadlines have something to do with that.

I’ll report back on my progress.

I couldn’t understand why. Even someone that is relatively unaware of the inner-workings of book publishing would assume that eBooks cost less to produce and distribute than a paperback or hardcover. So why does it cost more? It turns out, eBook sales are outpacing sales of both paperback and hardcover books (and is still growing rapidly). Supply and demand, or more specifically demand alone since supply is unlimited, is making it easy for book publishers to charge more for eBooks than logic would suggest.

Many people are preaching doom and gloom for the publishing industry but I would say it is entering into a brand new heyday. A time where the costs to create and distribute their goods is rapidly decreasing while the amount they can charge is steadily increasing. A boom, if I may.

I’m a proponent of people being paid, and paid well, for the things that they do. I’m not someone who believes that all things will or should be free. But I also believe in logical pricing. Many things can and should logically dictate the price of something. Supply and demand, cost of goods, overhead, delivery, support. However, when an industry sets price without logic is when it is poised for disruption. And I believe that after an initial boom the prices of eBooks will level-out if not decline rapidly.

The music industry went through this with the advent of the MP3. It turns out Apple is right. Single music tracks from our favorite artists can be only $.99 and both the labels and artist can make bundles of money. For some, like Kid Rock and others, this model is far too strict and confining because the artists aren’t allowed to “package” their products the way that they want. This may change (and I think it should) but no one can argue that the iTunes Music Store is a massive success for everyone involved in spite of its flaws.

I also think that the iTunes Music/App Store revolution has trained people into thinking that everything from a single music track to a complex mobile application should cost $.99. As a consumer I’m delighted with this but as a businessman I’m seeing this as a longterm issue. I’ll save this for another post, however.

I don’t pretend to know when the eBook pricing disruption will occur but I feel it is fast approaching. When it is no longer prudent to print hardcover or paperback versions of books, obviously, the amount that eBooks will sell for should dramatically decrease. But we’ll see. So long as people continue to pay for eBooks and continue to buy them at the pace they are now – the eBook boom could continue to swell for some time to come.

Tim Ferriss (whom I’ve mentioned that I met and shared a meal with once), the author of The 4-hour Work Week (which was great and is worth the read), has a brand new book called The 4-hour Body.

It is getting a lot of buzz this week and Tim even put together a pretty killer “trailer” for the book. Don’t be surprised if you see this video and other promotions by Tim on just about every single website you visit on the Web – he’s that good at marketing.

Ordered.

Here is the description of the book from the website:

“The world of business is coming full circle. The rise of the Internet and the empowerment of the common consumer has created a fundamental shift in how businesses are expected to behave. To take advantage of this opportunity, businesses will need to look backwards and scale the caring their grandparents’ businesses exhibited towards their customers or watch their competition pass them by.”

I think everyone can agree that modern day businesses don’t feel nearly as warm and cozy as the businesses of yesteryear. If anyone can instruct today’s businesses on how to use the social web to “scale caring” – Gary is the man to do it.

The story of White Fang is nothing too exciting, to be honest. To enjoy White Fang I’m guessing you’d have to be a dog lover, or a nature enthusiast, or simply enjoy reading about the Wild, the American Indian and the gold miner’s life and times through the eyes of an animal. There is no hook, no twist, no one thing that you can point to that would make someone want to read this book.

That doesn’t mean this book isn’t very good. In fact, I would recommend anyone give it a try. London often times feels a bit dry to most people but I think reading a dry book on occasion can really help a reader force focus. Never once, even after pages and pages of a small puppy’s first experiences, did I get bored or think that the story was being purposefully drawn out.

Here is a quick excerpt, ripped from Project Gutenburg where you can read White Fang in whole, where London describes the Wild’s desire to kill anything that moves.

“It is not the way of the Wild to like movement. Life is an offence to it, for life is movement; and the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man—man who is the most restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum that all movement must in the end come to the cessation of movement.”

London’s descriptions of Beauty Smith, who was the owner of White Fang for a time and treats him ill to become a prized dog-fighter, was simply brutal. I tweeted that I thought London had a personal vendetta he was filling with these pages. I thought it was great. He handed it to Beauty Smith. I wish it went on forever.

Looking back I think this is how London wrote White Fang. He probably created a list and story arc for this book. Dog is born. Dog lives. Dog fights. Dog gets angry. Dog gets happy. Dog travels to California. Then, he spent the next few years filling in the middle with as much detail as he possibly could dream up. Down to how the coals from a hot fire feel on the padded foot of a wolf. And somehow he pulled it off beautifully.

I should probably begin to rate books, since I’m reviewing them from time to time. I’ll rate them based on the following categories: Readability (the most important thing to this reader), writing, pace, and story. Here is how White Fang stacks up.

• Readability: 3.5 – I had little trouble getting through this book. Others, however, probably would.
• Writing: 4.0 – London’s pen for White Fang seemed to drip words onto the paper. Nothing forced.
• Pace: 3.0 – Slow at times. Even the action was seemingly in slow-mo. Not all bad.
• Story: 2.5 - Nothing to get excited about but worth a read.

Disclaimer: For those of you that do not know, I’m one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

/via Simon Willison.

This may perhaps be because of popularity of Pirates of the Caribbean and the harsh edge of a good pirate story worn down through comedy relief. A pirate story filled with peril isn’t one that you generally sweat over any more. Perhaps if this book was published in the 1950s it would be much more exciting – but in today’s market (at least in this reader’s imagination) the pirate story has been worn down to the nub.

This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it because Pirate Latitudes has its moments. While Crichton has written about voyages on the sea in the past (the most notable of which comes to mind is in Eaters of the Dead and perhaps the young T-Rex’s chase near the waterfalls in Jurassic Park) he certainly didn’t get to go into as much detail as he was able to with Pirate Latitudes. You get the sense that these men really felt much more at home on the sea than they did on land. They were their own society, as it is put in the book, with their own rules, their own code and their own objectives. They knew their craft (one of the characters being called a sea artist) and knew their seas. In this sense Pirate Latitudes was a fun read and I even found myself wishing that Crichton found a way to put even more of the nitty gritty sailing details into the book.

Unlike Prey, this story ended pretty strong and I would actually recommend reading it if you like a good pirate story.

Here are more of my reviews of books by Michael Crichton.

Marco Arment has now confirmed and previewed Instapaper for the iPad. In the post he says “an iPad without native Instapaper Pro is not a device I want to own.” I agree. Instapaper on the iPad is like the drugs+.

However, having purchased a new Macbook Pro just a little over 8 months ago I will not be getting an iPad for some time. I see an iPad, as I’m sure many do, as a secondary device to a main desktop computer. Not as a secondary device to a laptop. It just doesn’t seem practical. Of course, I could buy an iPad for no other reason than because I want one but that’d be frivolous and I’m generally not a frivolous person. At least I try not to be. I presume that at some point in the future when I need to replace my Macbook Pro (my last Macbook lasted over 3 years) I will purchase both a new desktop computer (some flavor of iMac perhaps?) and an iPad. I’ll let you know in a few years.

In West Virginia, last spring, we happened upon this small book store/library that was completely open with no one on staff at all. Just a building along a road with the door open, actually open not just unlocked, where you could go in grab a book or two. Totally awesome.

“Editor’s note: I don’t know Mandy Brown but her blog is definitely in the top three well-written blogs that I subscribe to. Every post is excellent. Her blog will, more than likely, make my Best of 2009 list.”

Well, I forgot to add Mandy Brown’s A Working Library to this year’s list. For this I deserve to be duly punished.

Her recent Ways of reading piece is more a list of tips about reading and keeping a library. It is absolutely delightful.

/via Jason Kottke.

I’m loving this book. Too bad it doesn’t help me with my cats!

I recently finished reading Prey by Michael Crichton. I’m a big Crichton fan for nearly no other reason than because my first book that I ever read, on my own without the nagging of any teachers or parents, was Jurassic Park. That and he knows how to write a book that makes you want to keep reading until the end.

Prey was disappointing in a few ways. It was a page turner but only because I had the feeling that it was going to end well and make up for the lack of meat in the middle of the book. It was one of those stories where you hoped the ending would make it worth reading. The ending wasn’t horrible but it left you with a sense that Crichton really didn’t know how to end the story. Stories that you want to be over are never good stories.

Crichton seems motived to write by his opinions on matters of economy, technology, or politics. Which is fine – any reason to write is a good reason – but if you can’t wrap a good enough story around an opinion then all you are left with is an opinion – and everyone has those.

At the end of the day Prey is decent book to read but you will never tell anyone else to go pick up the book and read it. Which is why I’m not telling you to do that. I suggest picking up one of Crichton’s classics instead like The Adromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Congo (horrible movie, great book), The Terminal Man, or Sphere.

In nearly every Twitter application, and on the site itself, you may favorite a Tweet with minimal effort. On the site you click the star, in Tweetie on Mac I have to secondary-click and select favorite, in Twitterrific on the iPhone I tap the asterisk and tap favorite. Those are the applications I use to interact with Twitter – so your mileage may vary.

Since Twitter is a literal stream of links (Fred Wilson, an investor in Twitter, remarked that its true value was in the act of passing links) I’ve come across a ton of valuable links from those I follow on Twitter. This can cause a lot of distraction, however. If I followed every single link that I found on Twitter, read them in their entirety, and continued my day … I do not believe I’d ever accomplish anything.

So that is why I use Twitter’s favorite feature to help me save links for reading later.

I still use it to save my favorite Tweets from those I follow. Tweets that are funny, memorable, mark an occasion, or the like – still make it into my favorites list. But mostly I’m using this feature to create a list of things I’d like to read later rather than at the moment they are posted.

This post could stop here because your favorites are easy to access on the site. Whenever you want to catch up on the links posted by those you follow – you could just log into Twitter.com and click on your favorites and do some reading. However I’ve found it much more efficient to subscribe to the RSS feed of my favorite Tweets and have that fed into Google Reader.

I check Google Reader a few times a week. I fly through my subscriptions and, in general, star the items that I want to read in detail, comment on, write about, or save for some particular purpose. As I’m going through my main subscriptions my favorite Tweets pop up and I’m able to then catalog those links appropriately, with some context, or just star them for later to read.

Not only do I rarely miss a valuable link posted by those I follow on Twitter, I get to read those links when I want to – rather than when they’re posted. Value without the distraction.

“In our own time, I wonder if the very slowness of books makes them more valuable in the face of all the quickness around us, if their singular nature will prove to be their saving grace. And if so, can that inspire the design of a reading experience on the web that strives for the same lack of haste? Can we envision a future where leisure has its place?”

You really should consider reading the entire entry. Grab a cup of coffee, or maybe start some dough for bread, and enjoy.

Editor’s note: I don’t know Mandy Brown but her blog is definitely in the top three well-written blogs that I subscribe to. Every post is excellent. Her blog will, more than likely, make my Best of 2009 ((See my Best of 2008 list.)) list.

Random 60: Reading. | Favorite on Viddler.

In this fast paced, Twitter-powered world it seems like all we do is consume shorter, and shorter bits of data. First it was blog posts, now it is micro-blogging with services like Twitter (I’m cdevroe by the way). I believe reading books can really slow us down, disconnect us from the Internet for a little while, and get us back to consumer larger ideas.

What do you think? When was the last time you read a book?

In short, Readability removes ads from around the content. However, unlike its predecessors (at least the ones I’ve seen) Readability also formats the article that you want to read into a much more readable design on the fly. So, ad-blocker plus.

Source: Readability.
See also: The Arc90 Lab’s blog post with video.

I’ve long respected Roger’s opinions of movies. It turns out I agree and respect his opinions on a great many things. Consider this my recommendation to subscribe.

Source: Roger Ebert’s Journal (Sadly it seems “blog” isn’t a good enough word.)

Ps. You can have a post-script on a blog, right? Anyway – I think I should take a taste of my own medicine and get back to some real blogging myself. Hmmm.

I’m no literary scholar by any stretch of the imagination. But I do know that there are only so many ways to tell a story. It is sort of like skinning a cat. There are many ways to do it but there are a few that are the most common. The Lord of the Rings is a “hero’s journey” story arc. It is the story of Frodo and the Ring. It doesn’t hide this, in fact, it states it plainly.

However, I won’t judge the story arc of The Fellowship of the Ring due to it being only the first three parts of a six-part series. In fact, it was never intended to be a book all its own at all. The rather anticlimactic ending shows this to be all too true. Instead I’ll focus on the way that The Fellowship of the Ring slowly unravels itself.

What I mean by that is that, I think, J. R. R. Tolkien does an incredible job at slowly, but not too slowly, revealing the backgrounds of the various characters that appear in the story line. The story progresses while at the same time it goes back and forth through time, mostly through the characters telling stories, so that the reader gets all of the information they need.

There are a number of ways to do this in story telling. Usually this is done by keeping the protagonist, or one of the main character’s in the story, ignorant of all the facts. This gives the other characters in the story many opportunities to fill in the details through dialogue. Many stories have a cast each with their own areas of expertise. An action hero paired with a scientist or scholar so that the “brain” can inform the “muscle” of the facts for the benefit of the audience. Or, this can be done with a narrator. The narrator, whether it be a character in the story or just someone telling the story, usually has all of the information because they are telling a story of times past. The Lord of the Rings has both of these really. Two of the main characters are, in fact, the narrators (and writer’s) of the books while their own characters, in this case the protagonist, is learning all of the details along the way. This leaves ample opportunity for explanation. Frodo is learning the story and telling the story at the same time.

I rather enjoy the way the back stories unfold in The Fellowship of the Ring. The deep history of the lands, characters, peoples, trees, and even mountains in The Lord of the Rings really shows the context of the current story. It shows that this particular story is only a small part, albeit an important part, of the history of the world in which this story is set. Small details are intertwined in dialogue, descriptions, and events that – unless the reader is paying attention – they may altogether miss. A few examples of this come to mind; Aragorn’s approximate age, the lineage of Arwen, and the history of Sauron. These stories are never told flatly but are rather pieced together through bits of information you get along the way. The only history not told in this way is the history of the hobbits which is told in the prologue. The history of Men, Elves, Dwarves, and many of the main characters are all unraveled from within the story itself.

By itself The Fellowship of the Ring is a great opening to a fantastic story. I was going to watch the movie version of this book in between finishing it and starting the next. But I fear that will ruin my mind’s impression of the book’s version of the story (since the movie version is a lot different). I’m looking forward to The Two Towers.

Airframe was written very much in this same Michael Crichton style – though that may be the only reason I was entertained by the book.

Airframe’s story is centered around Casey Singleton, an employee of an aircraft manufacturer, who finds herself with about one week to figure out what happened on a flight that killed a few people and injured many. The story has a few twists, like most good stories do, in that Singleton is being setup by her bosses to take a fall for the company, that the company itself has had a track record of problems with the plane that aren’t easily explained in a single sentence, and a popular TV-news program is about to run a story on her company’s “deathtrap” of a plane.

Airframe is captivating, no doubt.  Again, because I like the way Crichton moves through stories I was able to read this book with ease and without let up. It was never a chore.  But when I was finished with the story it didn’t make me want to start again.

If you’re a Crichton fan, I suggest giving this a read – preferably when you are on a plane, as I was when I began reading this book. It makes the story a little more fun.

Even though I read State of Fear a few months ago, I thought I’d jot down my overall thoughts of the book. As you might notice, I read nearly all of Crichton’s works, so even though the subject matter for this book isn’t particularly interesting to me, I read it because Crichton wrote it.

I’m a sheep, I know.

State of Fear is a story about the environment and the effect Global Warming is, or is not, having on it in the world around us. Is is also about a lawyer trying to pull all of the pieces together, along with a cast of other characters, of a plot to wreak some environmental havoc just as an environmental group is trying to score some dough for their work.

There is more to it, of course, like the whole ideal jousting about the environment and about whether or not Global Warming is a real threat, caused by humans or not, and even if it is having an effect on the planet as we speak.

An interesting way for an acclaimed author to get the information out there and into the hands of his readers without, perhaps, writing a work of non-fiction.

It is also hard to see where Crichton sits on this issue. Frankly, I do not care. Which is why I think he chose to keep it as vague and balanced as it appears to be by this uninformed environmental novice. It really seems like a report on the facts wrapped in an action-packed adventure.

Which is why, I believe, State of Fear will never become a movie. It would be very hard to strike this same balance with a movie. Everything would be critiqued. The Director’s opinions, the actor’s, the screenwriter’s, etc. Everyone that worked on the movie would have a play for the tilt.

Either way I applaud Crichton for keeping my attention long enough to give me all of the facts about Global Warming.  I’ll bet it was a challenge.

Then you have the health conscious individuals that focus on eating smaller meals much more often.  Proven to keep your metabolism raging throughout the day. Coupled with a good routine of exercise this is the sure-fire way to keep healthy and energetic.

But this post has nothing to do with food.  It has to do with reading habits.

I love words. Reading them, writing them, seeing them crafted in ways that I can only aspire to.  Because of this I read a lot.  But I don’t read books (as often as I’d like).  I read blogs, link lists, and tidbits of information strewn throughout the World Wide Web.

The link lists that I subscribe to are like little bits.  Snacks, if you will.  The really good ones will sum up entire articles in only a few sentences so that I’m not forced to read the entire linked-to-resource to find out why that person found it interesting.  Really bad ones do the opposite.

The blogs that I subscribe to, in general, are well-written, hand-crafted, and consistently of high-quality, interesting information.  The others are generally related to my work or things I’m interested in learning about.  There are, also, the few that seem to fill in the cracks to make my subscription list more human and fun like photo blogs, blogs written by friends or family, and Web comics.

Lately I’ve been questioning my information in-take.  What is better; reading these little bits of information rather than chewing on the whole meal, or maybe the other way around?

The more I think about it, the more I realize how new this dilemma is.  Before the advent of the Internet the only way to get this much information at one time was to have a stack of books or magazines sitting in front of you, rifling through them as fast as your thumbs would allow, and reading a single paragraph from each page as you did it.  You’d probably think someone doing that was crazy but that is exactly what it feels like I’m doing.

Have you ever spoken to someone who knows 20% about a topic?  Sure they can hold their own in passing conversation about the topic so long as the conversation doesn’t last longer than 30 seconds.  Once the conversation gets specific, the “20 percenter” is left standing there trying to catch up to the conversation and realizing they don’t know anything at all about the topic.

I’m beginning to think that unwittingly I’m going to end up being that person.  A topic will arise at a gathering that I’ve read only four sentences about and I’ll answer the inevitable question of “Have you heard about (insert topic here)?” with a resounding “Yes!”.  Then I’m caught.  I’ve just stepped through the door of saying that I know something when I truly don’t.  Well, yes, I’ve read four sentences about how the Mars-lander was able to take a solid, ice-like material, and turn it into water (H2O), but I know absolutely nothing more about the topic.

So what do I do?  Stop reading link lists?  Perhaps.

But then what about blogs?  More often than not blog posts by friends, family, or even those related to the industry I work in do little more than entertain, catch me up on “the news”, or completely distract me from what I should be doing.  Very, very rarely have I found a blog post to be wholly beneficial to have in my brain.

Think about it.  When was the last time you remembered a blog post, in its entirety, to solve a problem you encountered.  Right away you’re probably thinking about a problem you had with your iPhone, or some sort of electronic device, that you fixed because you read a blog post about it.  That may be true.  But couldn’t you have found that information by doing a quick Google search?

Since the Egyptians began beating up papyrus plants some 5,000+ years ago humans have used “books” ((Paper based products like scrolls, books, and loose-leaf paper included.)) so why should I be any different?  I really enjoy reading books.  The tangibleness of a book is much better than reading on-screen, which is part of it, but the other part is the wholeness of books.  It is an entire work in one spot.  Blog posts, for the most part, are just pieces of ideas and opinions about a given topic rather than an explanation about an entire topic.  More often than not they take for granted the fact that the reader understands the topic being discussed (perhaps due to context or just because it is something that is considered general knowledge by the audience).

So do I unsubscribe from every-single-blog, shutdown my computer, and just go to a library every time I need to learn something? I’d say absolutely not.  But I do think there is a balance and I’m going to work at striking it.