Currently in my drafts folder:
- Skinner Box
- Why Yoda is harmful
- Why people blog everything
- Why workflows are more interesting than actual work
Who knows when these ever see the light of day.
I have nothing to say, really.
Fuck off.
Essential Blogging
This morning I had an awesome idea: An art performance, reading the 2002 book “Essential Blogging” on stage, in a dramatic fashion.
The book has been flying around the office since forever, long before I even started here and by chance is has been sitting next to me for a while now, an artifact from a time long gone, back in the days when blogging was something exciting and new; dinosaurs like blogger, Movable Type and Blosxom ruled the world.
I think it would be possible to make a reading really good. There are ten chapters, with some editing this could become a one-week circle of performances. One person with a nice voice would be reading, maybe seated on some comfortable old chair. Soft piano music, if possible played on stage with the pianist in the background. A single spot on the reading person; no unnecessary theatrics.
I am sure this would not have mass appeal but I’d go and watch it. Or maybe sit there in the darkness of the auditorium, close my eyes and let the words of a bygone area soothe my spirits.
Bookmarks for July 25th through July 26th
- Poppy Dinsey: From fashion blogger to startup founder
- I wonder if this can happen to as well… #fashion #blogging #startup #entrepreneur #omg #hihi
- Fashion Agnostics Unite
- I wonder if this can happen to as well… #fashion #blogging #startup #entrepreneur #omg #hihi
- Chinese Reactions to Government’s Handling of Wenzhou Train Accident – chinaSMACK
- "4. Don’t investigate the cause of the accident, use information issued by authoritative departments"
- live.hackr : Search+
- "seo-technisch hat google […] noch einiges zu lernen"
- Gil Scott-Heron – Me And The Devil | Listen to Free Music Online | dominik – Blip.fm
- listening to "Gil Scott-Heron – Me And The Devil" ♫
Duck Week!
Lately I have been using all channels available to me to do one thing – whine, whine, whine.
This has to stop. So I decided to turn the week of most potential whining – which is the first week of August – into Duck Week. For one whole week, starting Monday at midnight to Sunday at midnight, every single thing I post to any kind of Social Media thing – here on my blog, on Tumblr, on Flickr, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, everywhere possible will be about ducks. Not about me, not about my whining, about ducks.
Why ducks?
Why not?
I will be collecting and chronicling the whole ducking experience on duckweek.com and of course at @duckweek. Contributors are more than welcome – if you want to make your first week of August 2011 a duck week – let me know!
Bookmarks for June 14th through June 15th
- Rivva
- The return of @rivva reminds me again how stupid the German blogosphere so often is.
- ntrnts
- RT @newezra: Single serving, fullscreen animated gifs? Yes! @topherchris's latest blog
- Property for sale in Wilsford Cum Lake – Houses for sale in Wilsford Cum Lake
- I would not go for a swim nearby these houses. #gnihihihi
- Adriano Celentano – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- @tomcoates I remember the Beatles, Joe Cocker, Adriano Celentano and the Spider Murphy Gang.
- Spider Murphy Gang – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- @tomcoates I remember the Beatles, Joe Cocker, Adriano Celentano and the Spider Murphy Gang.
- Untitled (http://www.lostfocus.de/archives/fun/bahn-it-ler.jpg)
- @widenka @johl "Top-Aktuell: EDV im modernen Arbeitsumfeld. "
- OmniGraffle Wireframe Stencils | Konigi
- Indexhibit
- "A web application used to build and maintain an archetypal, invisible website format that combines text, image, movie and sound."
- WordPress › Daring Fireball-style Linked List Plugin
- Worth having a look at, later. I'm not too sure what to do about the whole link blogging/bookmarking.
- Traumatic brain injuries in the Asterix comics
- Drowning my sorrows in Tannenzäpfle and old Top Gear episodes. | pixi.li
- Drowning my sorrows in Tannenzäpfle and old Top Gear episodes. #fb
- Download Go the F–k to Sleep | Adam Mansbach | Go the F–k to Sleep Audio Book UNABRIDGED | Audible Audiobooks | Audible Audio Edition |Audible.com
- Go the F–k to Sleep, Narrated by Samuel L Jackson
- (404) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/americas/78/default.stm
- RT @PRDH: More Britons died on the Titanic because they queued politely for the lifeboats – …
- China’s Cell Phone Pirates Are Bringing Down Middle Eastern Governments | Fast Company
- Fascinating article about the way Chinese Shanzhai phones are fueling the "Arab Spring"
Update over breakfast
I know I’ve said I’d write a lot about what’s happening during my trip to my blog, but it looks like this is not going to happen. I do keep notes and take pictures, but usually I’m too tired to write much one I’d have the quiet time to do so.
It is pretty amazing, though, how much I miss just twittering little impressions. For example right now – I’m sitting at the hotel breakfast room, typing this on my phone. It’s rather empty, so the girl who is overseeing the whole thing, has time to woo over the baby of a guest. Which is quite an adorable scene – and it’s those little impressions like that which I could capture via short tweets but wouldn’t note down and blog about later.
Well, bummer. I’m going to have another steamed bun. Best hotel breakfast ever.
Posted from WordPress for Android (What we used to call Moblogging back in the days.)
Tumblelogs
So, while Tumblr is down all day, why not have a look at Jason Kottke’s blogpost from 2005, describing the first tumblelogs?
Link blogging
Last night I’ve been discussing blogging1 with Chris and after she looked around a bit over here she asked me: “Why would I be interested in a link blog?” And a link blog is basically what this page is – I link to stuff I like or find to be interesting without adding much of my own opinion, experiences or that illusive personal voice. And basically it has been that way since always.2
Besides being too lazy to write more than a paragraph or two, I do have another “excuse” for “just” link blogging: I really do like link blogs. I have been following waxy.org/links for years, I’m following a whole bunch of people who share their links on Google Reader3 and I even built myself a little script that takes all status updates of the people I follow on twitter, scans them for links and builds a little link feed out of it. And I do follow a lot of people who do link a lot.4 And I sure love givemesomethingtoread.com.
Now why would I want to do such a thing or follow those kinds of blogs? It’s easy: they curate the web for me.
There are many people out there who create really outstanding, wonderful, inspiring stuff5 – texts, books, drawings, photography, movies and so on. And there is no way I on my own could be able to find those things that clearly deserve an audience.6 And those link blogs and shared items and links on twitter help me find both the popular things7 and the hidden gems.
And my rather humble hope is that a few people might like my selection of things from the web, either when actually following the blog here or by having stuff rated up on one of those tools that use link counts to determine which pages are worth having a look at. That’s why I keep linking to stuff that I find and find to be interesting, documenting what was worthy of my attention and recommending you guys to check it out.
The fact that I do that on many different platforms, very inconsistently and with no real system behind which tool I use to share those – that’s a whole different blog post right there.
- So, yeah, this is now going to be a blog-post about blogging. Very last decade, I know. I want to apologize for that in advance. [↩]
- Of course, back in the old days, I had this category Mademoiselles which was rather popular. [↩]
- Which is basically just link blogging for lazy people. [↩]
- I’m not actually reading that feed, but it is an excellent Spark for my Fever installation. [↩]
- Yeah, I prefer the word “stuff” over the word “content.” [↩]
- And clearly deserve me as an audience. Ha. [↩]
- Which usually, a week or two later, someone will be sending me as “funny” email or via IM [↩]
This blog on Twitter
As most of you might know, I am an avid and early user of Twitter. You can find me under @dominik. For a while I have played around with auto-posting my blog posts to this account, but soon I was annoyed by my own spammy behavior. Now it turns out that some people actually liked being notified of new blog posts via Twitter. This is why I now decided to auto-post my blog posts to the account @lostfocus – so, if you’re interested in stuff like this, go ahead and follow it. Enjoy.
Old school, three years later.
Now who of you guys is still here?
Blogging, Now and Then
Interesting comparison between blogging these days and early newspaper publications.
Oh, sod off.
Fun fact: Since I started writing a daily blog post, the visitor numbers here dropped by 25%. I must be doing something right.
28 days
February is a nice, short month. 28 days should be more than enough for one month, it’s conveniently exactly four weeks and all in all it seems to be right. Last year I celebrated February’s awesomeness by growing a mustache:
This year I want to torture myself a tiny bit more. While I might keep growing whatever you might call that has been hanging around my chin since October 4th and shave it into an awesome mustache at the end of the month, I did actually decide on something else for this year.
I will try to post a full-length blog post with at least a hundred words each and every single day. While I am aware that this might not sound like much of an undertaking for people who do write a lot – it is a lot for me. Usually everything I think about any given topic at any given moment can be neatly put into 140 characters. I will need your help with that. I’ll need some encouragement and especially topics to write about.
English
For quite a while I’ve been pondering language issues online – both on the (social) web generally and here on LostFocus specifically. And I know that many bi- or multilingual bloggers and developers1 of services on the web are facing the same general dilemma: stay within your local language and connect with local people or switch to the global lingua franca of the internet – English – and communicate globally with like-minded people, while constantly facing the danger of sounding like an idiot due to the fact that one isn’t using his first language.
I did put a lot of thought into this, so much in fact that I am getting too lazy to write it down for a blog post. In essence this is my way of telling you that as of today2 this blog here is going to be in English again. I’ll continue using English for most of my online communication – be it on Twitter, on Flickr, on Facebook or whatever happens to come next.
Blogger Buzz: Important Note to FTP Users
Blogger Buzz: Important Note to FTP Users
So, no more ftp from blogger.com. Kinda sad, I used to blog that way back in the days.