What makes good blog?

Merlin Mann breaks a personal rule and lists some elements he sees as indicitive of a good blog. I’ll admit, I don’t put enough energy into Thinking Out Loud to make it a good blog, but hopefully it at least has some kind of voice and communicates some of my obsessions.

I regret there are not more blogs that see format as the container for creativity — rather than an excuse to write less or link without context more. … Good blogs are weird. Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s.

That’s a mash of two of his point, but I see them pointing to one important (and really hard to do) thing: be creative. This is especially hard when you put on your public face and try to be semi-professional, but it’s a good reminder. It’s too easy to be lazy or casual with a blog, but when you consider how lucky we are to be able to publish so easily (compared to, say, a colonial newspaper), we owe it to ourselves to blog with at least a little panache.

The one thing I’ve always wondered is: do we have to do it each day?

Catchup

IT consumerization & higher ed: legal and educational problems

An Ars interview with Oren Sreebny, “director of emerging technology for the central IT and networking unit at the University of Washington,” reveals an interesting confluence between law, technology, and education.

Q: [Regarding the] legal headaches that higher ed IT departments have to deal with. He said something like “We spend more time being lawyers than we do IT people because of all these government requirements.” Do you find the same thing to be true where you are?

A: If you were a typical corporation, it’s my impression that you’d have lots of control over your data, and you’d say “this stuff can’t move to the cloud, and we won’t let it.” But in higher ed you don’t have that much control over people, because it’s a more loosely knit confederation of enterprises, so it becomes more of an education problem than a control problem.
[emphasis original]

Certainly an addition to the “education problem” is that the laws aren’t crystal clear. Technologists either need access to lawyers, a legal education, or clear guidelines. This offers another perspective on nervous service providers.

Quicksilver Labeling

I use OS X’s colored labels and smart folders to keep track of articles to read and things to do. Using the menus can be kind of a pain, and surprisingly, Quicksilver doesn’t have the ability to label built in.

These Applescripts can be used to quickly label an item in the Finder. Simply select the item, invoke Quicksilver, and type the name of the label. Don’t forget to have QS index the directory where you keep the scripts (mine are in ~/Library/scripts).

Enjoy!