SimonWaldman.net

I’ve started a new blog – Digital Disruption which is where I’m planning to put the bulk of my ‘serious blogging’ effort in from now on – allowing this place to be turned over to occasional indulgent whimsies about gadgets and music and the like.

Take a look…

Any of you who actually visit this blog rather than take a look at it in a news reader will notice that things have changed around here in terms of design. I’m a bit annoyed with myself because when I started blogging again, I promissed I would spend hours messing about with WP templates..but when I found out the old one was broken, then whoosh..before you know it, I’ve tried out a couple of dozen, before finally settling on this – a much appreciated free offering from DesignDisease, who deserve a bit of a plug.

The flexibility of WP continues to amaze, though. I’m just putting together a site for Wisley Airfield [long story, I'll tell you another time] anyway – it’s not really a blog, but I wanted it to be in WP.

Anyway – first stop ended up being WPMagThemes which was good, but didn’t have quite what I was looking for. But, I followed an ad from there to the RevolutionTheme – perfect..even if I had to pay $80 for it.

Back at Seedcamp in the Summer, I met the guys behind what was then a very wizzy little app called Zemanta. They went on to win it, which was great, even though I felt is was a solution looking for a problem. But then, hey – what do I know?

It effectively scanned a piece of copy and then recommended tags for it, looked up relevant pics on Flickr and also found relevant stories from around the web and articles on Wikipedia.

Anyway, this morning, I got an e-mail announcing that Zemanta is now ready to try out. It works as a Firefox plug in and then provides suggestions along side the editing window for Blogger, or WordPress (yes, even WordPress when you’re hosting it yourself). The screen grab above gives you an idea of how it looks.

It also has a terribly neat thing – that you can see above where it provides links to Wikipedia articles or company home pages, and you just click ‘Apply all’ and they all get edited in.

It’s terribly neat – and unsurprisingly seems to work much better as your posts get longer.

Definitely worth a try.

I don’t do Twitter. I have tried. I have signed up, and followed a few people. I really, really want to like it, but frankly it just falls off the list of things I can focus on in a given day. It’s just one stream of information too many.

Every now and again, I get an e-mail saying someone is now following me, and I feel like sending them a profound apology for the silence they get back in return. Well, I would – but I never quite get round to it.

Jeff meanwhile, loves it. When he wrote in Monday’s Guardian

I also read feeds of news headlines from the Guardian and individual reporters. Jim Long, a network news photographer, Twitters from White House trips. Ana Marie Cox, the former Wonkette blogger and queen of the snarky political post, has been using Twitter to cover the US primaries for Time.com. I blogged about that, saying she has found the perfect medium for her bon mots and snipes. She responded that Twitter is the perfect medium for covering a campaign. The format gives us a glimpse into what’s happening right now, and cuts to the bone. It’s a hack’s haiku

It’s clear that here is a man travelling on the information superhighway, while I’m busy chugging along on the hard shoulder.

But, the more I think about it, the more my resistance to Twitter and its ilk is as relevant as some people’s enthusiasm. And I give three reasons.

• The need to focus. What’s with this need for people to constantly provide a narrative of their life, rather than just living it? Actually, I understand the need…but I have the curse of a butterfly brain, and frankly the fewer distractions the better. If I go through the day thinking I should be telling people what I’m up to, I’d get even less done than I do already.
• Too much information. Too little value . If I twittered all day, and followed others tweets all night, would I really be any wiser, happier or wealthier?
• The challenge of brevity. You know that quote “I’ve written you a long note, because I don’t have time for a short note”. I have that problem with Twitter and Facebook status. I trip over myself trying to be concise and then the moment has passed.

I have a suspicion I’m heading to becoming the grumpy old man of digital. I just about keep a blog (how old fashioned is that!!!), and I just use an RSS reader. No Tumblr, no Twitter and I haven’t updated my Facebook status for months.