The first of September. So we’ve exited the summer, where people only celebrate blogging for no good reason, and which is far too hot anyway. It definitely felt like winter the other day when it was pitch black at 9pm. An uni starts again in a couple of weeks. Gah.
Archive: Blogging
Hmm. Sorry for the light blogging recently. I’ve not really been in the mood. I’ve felt like half a person for a while now. Also, sorry that most of the posts are about Formula 1 at the moment.
While I can’t think of anything interesting to write about, I might as well do the Political Compass again. I am sure many readers will be aware of the Political Compass already. But I haven’t taken it for a year or two, so I thought it would be interesting to see where I am on it now.
Economic Left/Right: -0.13
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.08
It is pretty much what I expected. The past couple of times I took the test I was further to the left on the horizontal (economic) axis and maybe a bit further towards the bottom of the vertical (social) axis. The last time I actually expected to be further towards the centre on the economic scale: I have considered myself to be an economic centrist for years now.
This time around I am pretty much bang on the centre (just ever so slightly to the left), and still very much a social libertarian.
I’ve also taken this survey again, and I came up as pretty left-wing and pretty pragmatic. Not too far away from Charles Kennedy.
The Devil’s Kitchen has reached his 1000th post. To celebrate, he’s decided to literally voice his concerns.
It’s not quite what I expected. I was expecting some real anger, or at least some Charlie Brooker-style audible eye-rolling. The deadpan delivery did make me laugh though.
I have been considering making a voice post or putting some kind of snippet up. But I’ve decided against it so far. For a start, I wouldn’t know what to say. And most importantly of all, my voice is awful. I sound like Richard Ayoade’s nerd-voice.
There is an interesting post at canspice.org about tagging (not to be confused with the tagging that you get with memes).
Tagging already has a couple of well-known problems. One of the major ones is the confusion over whether you should use singular or plural. Flickr cleverly bypassed the other problem — words such as ‘bush’ that have two meanings — by creating clusters.
Tagging is about as trendy as it gets these days. You’re setting up a website — but if it hasn’t got tagging involved somewhere, you can take your arse right out of Web 2.0. We don’t need the likes of you around here.
The problem is that each site implements tags completely differently. The plugin that I use to tag posts on my blog automatically converts hyphens into spaces so that when, for instance, somebody searches for ‘formula 1‘ on Technorati, the posts that I tagged with ‘formula-1′ will appear.
Flickr is slightly more restrictive. Spaces are allowed, but you’ve got to stick quotation marks around any tags with more than one word.
del.icio.us is even more restrictive — it won’t let you use spaces at all. So I decided to use the next best thing, which in my view was the hyphen. Unfortunately, most people seem to use what Brad at canspice.org calls the mashup technique. Search for ‘formula-1‘ on del.icio.us and just about all of the entries are posted by me; searching for ‘formula1‘ brings up far more links.
Brad outlined why he thinks more people should use hyphens rather than underscores or the ‘mashup’ technique. The problem is, with the whole tagging idea being that it’s driven from the bottom-up, it’s going to be difficult to get everybody using a standard.
Do many people actually care about tags anyway though?
First of all, I am so sorry sorry sorry for writing this post. I thought I had grown out of writing about blogging, but it’s just a bad habit; an itch you have to scratch. Clearly I have had a lot of thoughts about blogging since whenever the last time I wrote about it was. As such this is an embarassingly long and rambling post. Apologies. Anybody who reaches the end gets a sweetie.
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