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February 25, 2005
A Kauai Blog
Andy's started his blog, using WordPress. It looks great, though a few teething problems remain in the links.
As Patrick Chanezon noticed, blogs could serve as a link between the culture of email, and the culture of websites.
It depends on the topic, but if you're going to write something semi-permanent, it's nice to know it'll remain postend and searchable. How offended will you be when instead of answering an email directly, I post a response in my blogs and send you a link?
Posted by Mark at February 25, 2005 01:34 PM
Comments
Sorry about the broken links, it's temporarily fixed now. I wanted those nice human-readable links, but the system wasn't cooperating. I hope I can figure them out eventually.
To answer your last question (with a question): isn't it more complicated to write in the blog and then send an email with the link than to just write in an email? However, this gave me the idea of a Personal Communicator center: an application that lets you blog, email, chat, invite, whatever. You'll have the input on one half of the screen, and a text box for output on the other. Note that since some blogs allow you to turn emails to a specific address into posts, you can sorta do this from existing email software.
Posted by: Andy at February 25, 2005 08:43 PM
I forgot to add that wordpress works OK, but it quickly gets complicated to customize. You really need programming or system experience to understand how to do that.
And their tech support, which is a public blog itself, demonstrates the limitations of blogging. To have everybody posting and answering each other does not lead to an efficient help system. For example, I found an answer there but it didn't work for me because it related to a previous version of their software, except this wasn't clearly stated.
The point is, blogging and the interaction and exchange it provides leads to some new and exciting modes of communication. Of course, people try to adapt this new and fashionable tool to all sorts of purposes, some of which don't work, and it'll take a while to sort out what does work.
Posted by: Andy at February 25, 2005 08:55 PM
In my experience, email's great until you've read it, filed it, and forgotten about it for a while. Then it becomes difficult to find again. Also it's probably written in such a way that you have to do some work in order to use it out of context -- either you rewrite part of it, or you force the recipient to work the information out of the context.
Your idea for a Personal Communicator center sounds right. If you have something relatively permanent, you can blog it. Maybe you could send the same in email.
In a way the Personal Communicator center almost already exists. It's the combination of my browser and mail client. If only I could choose the editor myself... ;-)
Posted by: Mark at February 25, 2005 10:04 PM