There are many advantages of using Twitter to spread your message. I have written before about the fact that in some respects Twitter seems to have superseded social bookmarking sites like Delicious. The reason? Twitter has an upper hand in any activity where you want to alert people right away to something you want to share right now.

But this immediacy comes at the expense of its long-term value. Trying to find an old tweet is a nightmare; an impossibility even. You can’t tag tweets — at least without substantially eating into your stringent 140 character limit. And the use of URL shortening services necessitated by Twitter’s character limit comes with its own bucketful of problems.

So should a newspaper completely ditch RSS feeds in favour of Twitter, as Malcolm Coles seems to suggest? Hell no.

His first argument is the strangest of the lot. He points out that many RSS feeds provided by newspapers appear to have few subscribers, and maintains that this is a weakness of RSS.

Despite having virtually no users, the Mail churns out 160 RSS feeds and the Mirror 280. All so a couple of thousand people can look at them in total.

The other papers are just as bad. And while the Guardian has a couple of RSS readers with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK …

Never heard of the long tail? Having few subscribers to an RSS feed isn’t a weakness. In fact, it plays to the strengths of RSS feeds as the ideal way to disseminate niche content. For me, the problem with newspapers’ approaches to RSS feeds is the complete opposite. As I have written before, they don’t offer enough RSS feeds.

You can scoff at the fact that The Guardian publishes more RSS feeds than there are people living in the UK. But the cost of doing so is pretty small, especially if the feed doesn’t actually have that many takers (because then it uses up less bandwidth). Indeed, as Jon Bounds notes in the comments to the article, in a decent CMS it will take longer (i.e. be more costly) to switch an RSS feed off rather than leave it on.

What potential alternative does a newspaper have if it decides to give up on RSS? Twitter seems to be the big suggestion. Would a Melanie Phillips Twitter account run by the Daily Mail have more than 11 followers on Twitter? Maybe, but the majority of them would probably be robots advertising mucky webcam shows.

For Malcolm Coles, Twitter would be better because you can see which stories are the best by seeing what is retweeted. Retweets are extra good because they promote a newspaper’s content. But people will tweet and retweet about articles they like anyway, whether it comes from an official newspaper Twitter account or not. And to be honest, I could do without my Twitter stream being filled with yet more junky retweets.

According to Malcolm Coles, you can also provide more context in Twitter because “There’s space in 140 characters for newspapers to give some background to stories as well as the headline.” But you can provide the whole article in an RSS feed if you want to, as The Guardian (whose RSS feeds are by far the most popular) has demonstrated. The inability to provide context is in fact Twitter’s greatest weakness. Even a social bookmarking site like Delicious gives you 1,000 characters to play with, not just 140.

It is true that you can have a conversation about stories on Twitter, which you can’t do with RSS feeds. Conversation is practically the raison d’être of Twitter though, so this is not exactly a surprise. All that this underlines is the fact that Twitter and RSS are two very different kinds of tools. One cannot be comfortably substituted for the other.

Malcolm Coles says that the newspapers agree with him because they do not bother to promote their RSS feeds properly. He says that they “have already given up on RSS feeds and no longer actively promote them.”

This ignores the fact that newspapers have never actively promoted RSS feeds. Promotions of RSS feeds haven’t just recently been relegated to the footers. If anything, they have just been promoted there. My last post about newspapers’ RSS feeds outlined my exasperation over the fact that their implementation is sloppy and amateurish, and it is nigh-on impossible to find out if the RSS feed you’re looking for even exists, never mind where it is.

Perhaps, indeed, the newspapers’ failure to properly promote their RSS feeds this is the reason why Melanie Phillips only has eleven subscribers in Google Reader. Maybe Malcolm Coles sees this as a chicken-and-egg scenario, but in this case I definitely know which came first.

The real problem is not that RSS has failed for newspapers. It’s that newspapers have failed at RSS. This is demonstrated by the fact that in the comments, Malcolm Coles ends up relying on the unreliability of the Express’s RSS feeds, rather than any inherent weaknesses in the RSS format itself, in his attempts to support his arguments. If the Express’s RSS feeds are broken and poorly promoted, that’s the Express’s fault, not RSS’s fault.

Dan Thornton in the comments hits the nail on the head:

Personally, if newspapers turned off RSS, I suspect they’d never see me visit their sites again – I use Twitter as a real time stream of information, but my RSS Reader is a library of sources I’ve invested time nad effort in reading regularly and getting to know. One doesn’t replace the other – they co-exist.

Twitter is used by different people for a wide variety of purposes now. But due to the space constraints, it requires a fair bit of creativity on the Twitter user’s part. Twitter has almost developed a language of its own.

Very quickly, a convention developed whereby @username signified that this tweet is a reply to one of that user’s recent tweets. Twitter recognised this and built the functionality into the system. Later on, #hashtag acted as a tag for your tweet, the idea being to make it easy to find tweets on certain subjects using a site like #hashtags or Twitter’s own search function. Even more recently, the retweet (now commonly signified by RT) has emerged as a popular way to share other people’s great tweets.

What does this have to do with social bookmarking? Well, a large amount of retweets are just interesting links. That means that a lot of original tweets are just interesting links. But hang on — isn’t a social bookmarking service like Delicious more suitable for sharing interesting links?

It should be, but it’s not. Now let us get one thing straight here. I am a huge fan of Delicious. I have been using it for over four years now, and in that time I have amassed a collection of 7,493 bookmarks across my three accounts. And I won’t stop using it any time soon.

But sometimes, I find it much more satisfying to just paste a URL into Twitter and share the link that way. It is pretty clear that a lot of people do too.

Take the two most recent posts on this blog: ‘Why are newspapers hiding their niche content?‘ and ‘The Edinburgh Twestival‘. Both of these posts were shared around a bit on Twitter.

Certainly, you would expect that for a post about the Edinburgh Twestival. People interested in that post are likely to be Twitter users. This post was shared by five different people (including, it has to be said, me) on Twitter. Four of them were retweets of my original tweet. Google Analytics suggests that 15 visitors landed on the page from the Twitter website (and that doesn’t include any visits that came from Twitter clients, Twitter streams embedded on webpages, etc.). No one shared it on Delicious.

As for the post about RSS feeds, it was shared by four people on Twitter (including me again), one of which was a retweet. It was also shared by four people on Delicious. But three of those people are also the three people who shared it on Twitter! Delicious doesn’t timestamp entries, but I am pretty sure all of them posted to Delicious after posting it to Twitter (let me know if I’m wrong about that). Very probably, two of them discovered it through Twitter rather than anywhere else. So far, the post has had 18 visitors from Twitter, and just five from Delicious.

So is Twitter doing the job of sharing interesting links better than Delicious, the daddy of social bookmarking sites? Almost certainly. And it struck me why while I watched the video currently sitting on the dead / dormant Ma.gnolia website. Ma.gnolia was another social bookmarking website, that was recently taken down for good by a massive database problem. The video is a post-mortem on Ma.gnolia, but it also feels a little bit like a post-mortem on social bookmarking as a whole.

During the interview, Larry Halff points out that the biggest link-sharing website is not Delicious as is commonly suggested — it’s Facebook. It reminds me of the often-forgotten fact that the biggest photo-sharing website is not Flickr, nor is it even Imageshack or Photobucket — it’s Facebook.

This is not because Facebook is better than Flickr for sharing your photos — far from it. Nor is it remotely as good as Delicious for link-sharing. But Facebook is certainly the best place for sharing your photos and link-sharing. That is for one simple reason: Facebook has more users, meaning that you can reach more people more quickly. It’s what Facebook like to call the social graph. It doesn’t matter if the functionality is a bit basic. What matters is that all your friends are on it.

Twitter is no Facebook. While most of my “real life” friends are on Facebook, Twitter has just a smattering of my real life friends. But I follow a great deal of people whose content I just find interesting — bloggers and other online associates with whom I have built a digital acquaintanceship over the years.

Most importantly when it comes to reaching a large amount of people, I know that Twitter is extremely addictive. I know that dozens of my Twitter followers will have a Twitter application of some kind open. I am watching the messages from them tumble down the screen all the time. It feels like I’m having a conversation. I know that I will reach a lot of people by posting a link in Twitter. Then I could have a conversation with people who are interested in that link.

That sense of vibrancy just isn’t there in Delicious. The reason? This social bookmarking service just isn’t social enough. Its social functionality basically extends to being able to add other users to your ‘network’, and being able to inform them of links you think they will find interesting by using a special tag. And that’s it. There are no comments. There is no conversation. There is near enough no social. Just lists of links.

Is there the scope for a TweetDeck-style Delicious application? You could leave it open all day and watch the links from your friends stream in, just as we watch our friends’ tweets. You could use the notes section to leave comments (have a conversation). There could be special tags that allow you to use the notes section to reply to your friends.

I have seen people tag their bookmarks as via:username to signify how they found the link — but Delicious doesn’t appear to recognise it in any special way. Twitter were really smart to capitalise on the @replies convention, because it has made Twitter much more of a social tool. Delicious feels stagnant in comparison. But it seems like it could be easy to fix. So why don’t they?

You may know that when I set up vee8, it was as a spin-off to my personal blog, doctorvee. Essentially, I had set up two blogs when I only really had enough content for one blog. I suspected I wouldn’t be able to produce enough F1 content to justify setting up a totally new blog.

If anything, my time constraints have become more severe since then. I am heavily involved in running four blogs, and much of my spare time just now is spent looking for a job. Then once I find a job I will have even less spare time for obvious reasons.

Originally I had two plans in mind to make producing content for vee8 easier.

First of all, I decided to invite everyone to post. The idea was to have the openness of a forum with the format of a blog. It was experimental. I always suspected that not many people would take it up. After all, there are plenty of other outlets for people to express their opinions, and the F1 blogosphere has developed even more since then.

That made it all the more surprising that some people actually did decide to write one or two posts for this site. So my thanks go out to Christine, Brits on Pole, Onebrow, Ollie, Ponzonha, Sammy the Finn and Scott Woodwiss for making use of the facility and producing great posts for this site.

But now I have closed down new user registration. That is not to say I am totally ruling out any guest posts in the future, and everyone who has registered is still very welcome to write a post for vee8 if they wish. But in general, any future guest posts will be done on the sort of basis they are done on other websites.

My other plan to beef up the content on this blog was to produce daily news roundups. I believe this feature proved to be popular. Back then, I don’t think anyone was offering a similar kind of service. But today, both Keith at F1 Fanatic and Christine at F1 Minute produce their own regular links roundups and make heavier use of Delicious.

Now that these two adequate alternatives to my daily links service are available, it is no longer the USP it once was. Furthermore, the time constraints I have already mentioned mean that I am no longer able to hunt for links from a variety of locations. I now normally stick to the same old sources, and if you read my daily links regularly you will already be well aware of what those sources are.

This is where your help comes in. Do you, as a reader, still value the daily links roundups? Should I re-think the feature? Give up on it completely?

Over the next few days I will be tweaking the design of the site to make it more suitable for the direction I want to take vee8 in for the new season. I am still not sure how often I will be able to keep vee8 updated. I have found it difficult over the off-season, but I was exceptionally busy in December and January, and I might well get back into the swing of things come Melbourne.

But while I am considering all of this, now is a good time to ask you guys for your advice. This will help me as a content producer get more out of vee8, and hopefully it will help you get more out of it too. Any thoughts are welcome!

I’m not sure that much of what Paul Boutin says is new though. The first time I heard about the article was through Mike Power who added:

…most people under 20 wouldn’t touch blogging with a barge pole, seeing it as old-fashioned and nerdy.

That’s an interesting point. A lot of outsiders tend to think of blogging and the like as something that young people do. But I remember a few years ago a survey finding that the average age of readers of political blogs in the UK is around 40. That might be younger than, say, the average age of readers of The Telegraph, but we’re not talking about the cast of Skins here.

Before that, I always wondered why there weren’t more people my age blogging. I started blogging six years ago when I was 16, but I am an outlier. I can’t think of anyone else who has been blogging for that long from such a young age (though no doubt there are some). I struggle even to think of many bloggers who are my age or younger full stop. There are a few that I know of, but I could probably count them on one hand.

This links neatly in with one of Paul Boutin’s points though. Blogging is being overtaken by social networking sites like Facebook. It’s worth remembering why I started blogging. It is simple: I was bored. My first post was written on a cold, boring night in the middle of the Christmas school holiday.

Moreover, if I had an aim with my blog, it was as a really easy way to reach a wide variety of friends in a really efficient way. At first I was peeved when I realised that my friends couldn’t be bothered reading my blog. What I had forgotten was that, while updating a blog was efficient for me, it was wildly inefficient to get all of my friends to keep on visiting my blog all the time.

Social networking sites fix that problem by giving everyone a central space to share their thoughts and news. No doubt if sites like Bebo and Facebook were around back then, I wouldn’t have started a blog. Indeed, I originally wanted to set up a LiveJournal rather than a blog, but back then you had to pay for a LiveJournal account, so I set up with Blogger instead.

The only reason I stuck with blogging was through the quite accidental discovery that, while my friends were seemingly uninterested in what I had to say, complete strangers would regularly visit to see what I was thinking. That amazing fact is what keeps me going as a blogger, despite some pretty dry patches over the years.

And I’m lucky to have discovered that. Blogging has given me plenty of opportunities that I would never have had were I a simple Facebook user. Undoubtedly my life has been enriched by blogging as it has furnished me with an armful of skills. A 16-year-old Duncan Stephen today would almost certainly not start blogging — but he’d be worse off for it.

But it is important for blogging that the landscape has changed over the past few years. Before 2004, the buzzword was blogging, pretty much exclusively so. Today you can add podcasts, social networks, Flickr, YouTube, wikis, microblogging, social bookmarking, tumblelogging and an increasing list of tools that are all lumped together under the “web 2.0″ umbrella. And when the landscape changes, blogging will inevitably have to evolve. As Rory Cellan Jones says, “its nature is changing.”

The evolution of blogging is nothing new though. By most accounts, blogging is now over ten years old, easily out-dating the web 2.0 phenomenon. The man who is said to have coined the word weblog, Jorn Barger, intended it to mean “logging the web”. That makes tumblelogging or linklogging services such as Delicious a much closer relative to the earliest blogs than what are today known as blogs.

Similarly, during a middle period beginning at the start of this decade, blogging was taken broadly to mean an online journal or a diary, often with very personal posts. Today, that would be seen as quite odd, since social networking sites such as Facebook are a much more appropriate, private place to talk about your personal life. It might seem inappropriate that people blogged so much about personal issues, but prior to the likes of Facebook, people had no choice.

Meanwhile, the stereotypical blogger writing about what he had for breakfast has now moved wholesale over to Twitter, a more relaxed place where there is no stigma to writing banal, inconsequential nonsense. Mind you, the advent of Qwitter may change that!

Over the years, my blog has evolved from being somewhere where I would (quite inadvisedly, and sometimes shamefully) leave personal rants, or write about what I had for breakfast, to a place where I would take part in conversations about current issues. Instead of writing a few short and snappy posts per day, this blog now more-or-less exclusively contains posts around 1,000+ words long typically published several days apart. Whereas a few years ago I may have written a stream of consciousness, today I might spend a few days (or even a few months!) mulling over a subject before writing it down. Places like Flickr and Twitter certainly wouldn’t allow me to do that, as Paul Stamatiou points out.

Instead of being a one-stop-shop for all things me, my blog is now just one part of a huge range of online activities. How all of these activities relate to each other and what I should publicise where is a problem that I still grapple with, and I probably won’t stop grappling with it any time soon. (I’ve currently settled on gathering everything in a ‘sidebar’ on the home page.)

A lot of blogs have undergone a similar transformation over the years. It’s notable how many people are now relatively quiet on their blogs, but are still updating Twitter regularly. As if to illustrate that, an item on the Today programme this morning was meant to discuss the death of blogging but ended up dwelling more on the popularity of Twitter.

But saying today that this shift to other services like Twitter is a sign that blogging is dead is just as daft as saying in 2004 that blogging threatened the death of the mainstream media. It would be deeply ironic if the once vibrant and hip blogging scene were to itself become threatened by new technology. But it won’t. The world evolves and blogging simply has to evolve with it, just as the mainstream media evolved with the advent of blogging. Rather than dying, blogging is maturing, as Gary Andrews notes.

I think Paul Boutin makes some really good points, but he misses the point a few times. Trolls and flamers in comments are a well-known problem. But let’s face it, that is hardly confined to blogging. That is a problem with the internet in general.

Meanwhile, the point about most bloggers being unable to compete with the top 100 is nothing short of bizarre. How many people really start blogging with the intention of being in the top 100? Though being in the top 100 would be nice, it is far from my primary motivation. Has Paul Boutain never heard of the long tail? As John Connell notes, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, is the father of the long tail. All-in-all, it’s just a really odd argument to be put forward in such an arena.

And the idea that Google doesn’t notice blogs any more is absolutely bizarre. This certainly does not chime with my experiences. Over three quarters of my visitors come from search engines. That figure used to be closer to two thirds. My friends often tell me that they accidentally found my blog when they were searching for something (that’s the only way I can get them to read my blog to this day!). I myself have, to my annoyance, had my blog come up as a high result in a search.

Then there is the idea that blogs need to be personal to be valuable to people. I hardly think this is so. In fact, this is a complete contradiction to Paul Boutin’s assertion that bloggers all aspire to be the next Huffington Post or Treehugger, not exactly the most personal sites in the world. As Robin Hamman says, Twitter and Facebook may lead to the decline of the diarist blogger, but the topical blogger remains unaffected.

Nowadays, with the likes of Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, there might be easier — and more personal — ways to publish your content than to start a blog. And there is absolutely no doubt that maintaining a blog is a major commitment. But that doesn’t mean that blogging doesn’t have an important role to play. In fact, I would argue that it makes blogging all the more important.

At first I put up two different solutions on the one page (lifestream). But that was still out of the way, and it wasn’t very good either.

So instead I have decided to sweep up the sidebar and put in what I’m calling a ‘sideblog’. Note that if you’ve come here from an RSS reader, it only appears on the homepage.

The sidebar aggregates my content from all sorts of different places — my other blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Last.fm, Flickr and more. Comments that are posted on this blog also now reside there — although I haven’t yet worked out if this is a mistake or not. Everything else in the sideblog is ‘my’ content, but the comments are clearly not. So I might separate them out again later on. Any thoughts?

The sideblog is arranged in chronological order, but to save it from getting bombarded with content from one place (for instance, I uploaded 40-odd photographs to Flickr today), I’ve limited each site to having five entries at a time. The exceptions are Delicious which is limited to 10 and Last.fm which is limited to 1.

I built the sideblog using Yahoo! Pipes (which I found very difficult to get to grips with at first, but I eventually got it to do more or less what I wanted to do) and SimplePie. Some pretty desperate CSS magic got the icons appearing kind-of where I wanted them to.

Any thoughts on it? Hopefully it will be a good way of getting more fresh content here for the times when I am posting more at other places. I’ve kept a copy of the old sidebar though in case anyone is offended enough to want the old one back.

I knew it would be like that, so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to finish of the new theme for this website, which I have been working on for a couple of months. (That was the new thing that I hinted about in a previous post.) And tonight I’ve decided it’s good enough to launch it. I’ll still be tweaking bits and pieces, and one or two new features will be added over the weekend. In the meantime, any feedback would be greatly welcomed. If you spot any bugs then do please let me know.

One of the reasons I decided to opt for a new look was just so that I could get an original design up. Although the previous look, which was inspired by the classic FOM graphics used throughout the 1990s, was quaint, it was also a bit unoriginal of me. I wanted to give vee8 its own unique identity.

You will see also that in the sidebar I have built a comprehensive index. You can now choose to view posts that mention a particular driver, team or grand prix. There is also now a full A–Z index.

The new look also puts more emphasis on the author of each post. Beforehand it wasn’t terribly obvious who wrote each post. Now the author’s handle appears on a bold red background and a gavatar (or identicon) is also displayed.

Speaking of post authors…

Important notice for anyone who has submitted a post

A few months ago the good people of Brits On Pole registered here and wrote a post. And it never got published. They emailed me about it, and I didn’t have a clue what was happening. There was no sign of the rogue post anywhere. Later on they submitted a couple of other posts and the process worked fine.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I wondered if the problem struck anyone else. So I’m writing a note here to ask if that has happened to any of you guys. 16 people have registered, but only seven of them have submitted a post — as far as I know.

I have never rejected a post for vee8, so if you submitted a post and it never appeared it wasn’t because I didn’t like what you wrote. It must simply have got lost. Please accept my apologies if your post was lost, and do feel free to write another one. But perhaps keep a backup copy yourself and email it to me in case it gets lost again.

Thanks!

Daily news update has evolved

You may have noticed recently that I’ve had a bit of trouble with the daily news update. Instead of using Delicious’s own tool for publishing a daily post, I have decided to use a plugin (Postalicious) instead.

Postalicious confused me for a while. In fact, in all honest, it still confuses me a little bit. I can’t tell exactly when it will post something, even after setting it all up the way I wanted. Hopefully in the long run it will be published daily at 1700 UK time — as long as there are three or more links for that day.

Using Twitter to liveblog the race is no more

I have decided to ditch my old habit of updating the Twitter account throughout the race. My original intention was for my tweets to act as the race report. In reality, Twitter was simply not reliable enough to work like this. I found that when the daily Twitter post was published here, huge chunks of the race were missing. In the meantime, I will be focussing all my attention on the F1 Fanatic liveblog.

I will still use Twitter to post quick comments though.

Guilty as charged. A number of elements have conspired against me when it comes to updating this blog.

First of all, I set up a separate F1 blog — immediately robbing this place of around half its content! Then there was the fact that I was in my final year at university. I didn’t want to mess it up as the dissertation deadline passed, then essay deadlines, then the exams came along.

Even since the exams have finished, though, it hasn’t quite worked out. I always find the transition from busy (!) student to lazy summertime bum difficult for some reason that I can’t put my finger on. Blogging always takes a back seat for a week or two as I grab some rest and get those summer jobs dealt with. I have been — gasp — reading books for leisure (which I never get the time to do during term time). I have been listening to that pile of unlistened-to CDs that has built up since last summer. The pile is now down to six which is very exciting. I have also tidied my room from top to bottom, sorting through stuff to work out if I should chuck them out or not.

Then there is the small matter of finding a job. Or, more accurately, working out what my career is going to be. Now that university is over for good (and I doubt I will be darkening the doors of academia again), I can now — belatedly — devote more of my brain power towards researching careers. I have not got very far forward. Every time I seem to get closer to finding a path that I find acceptable, something comes along to put me off. For this and various other reasons, I still find myself running around Edinburgh from time to time.

Also, for the past seven or eight months I have routinely been taking daily walks round the park and suchlike. This was partly to get me out of the house and into the sun. It is also with one eye on my slowly-but-surely expanding belly. A good side-effect is that I spend the walks listening to podcasts that I would never otherwise manage to listen to. However, it’s possibly fair to assume that this time may otherwise have been spent blogging which is why things have been a lot quieter here over the past year or so.

Then, just when I was ready to get back into the swing of things, all of my websites were knocked out by that exploding transformer. Then a different issue put my websites out of action on Tuesday as well! All-in-all, I lost about three days of possible blogging activity.

And then I got some good news. I’ve got a degree, and it’s a 2:1. It was such a relief — I was genuinely worried that I was headed for a 2:2 which would have been seriously demoralising. I would really have kicked myself for a few things if that happened, but somehow I have escaped.

I still don’t know the marks for all of my courses yet, which is quite frustrating. Of the scores that I know, I was on course for a 2:2. And I am sure I muffed up one of the exams that I haven’t had back yet. I’d love to think it was my dissertation that pulled the whole lot up. Anyway, I shouldn’t worry about that now. What matters is that I’ll be doing the silly dressing up thing with the stupid hats and scroll things later this month. (Incidentally, does anyone know where the hell you get a white bow tie in this area? That is the rubbish I am being asked to wear for this thing.)

All of this is just a really long-winded way of saying: yes, I know, it’s quiet round here. Jeff said that the scarcity posts is made up for with thorough detail. That is really a side-effect of the fact that it takes me so bloody long to get round to writing anything. By the time I’ve reached this little screen my head has collected so many thoughts on the issue that I end up writing a bloomin’ essay. Even this post is probably about 2,000 words long now.

The thing is, just because I’m not posting much on this blog doesn’t mean I’m not posting much at all. There are four other major outlets of mine. Twitter is the main one where I post anything that will fit into the 140 character limit. Then there is Delicious where I post interesting links, often along with a pithy comment. Then there are the two other blogs, Scottish Roundup and vee8.

These all have a presence on the sidebar here, but I thought it would be good to have an area where all of these various updates are gathered on one page. I started with a lifestream (launched a few weeks ago, though I kept it quiet). But I wanted something a bit different so I spent a bit of time in Yahoo! Pipes to create what I have modestly called the “megafeed“. For the time being I’ve placed it just above the lifestream on… the lifestream page.

Neither of them is exactly perfect. The lifestream just contains the headlines of each item. It incorporates Last.fm as well, but it’s pretty rough and ready really. Meanwhile, the megafeed just looks like a big list of stuff. There’s no way to tell whether it’s a Twitter update, a blog post or what. I tried to make it more obvious, but either there isn’t a way to do it in Yahoo! Pipes or I am too much of a n00b to work out how to do it. Just thought I’d mention it since I spent a bit of time on it. Think of it as a stalking opportunity.

Now that I have sorted that out, it is time to post not just in the four other places but here as well. Now I have drawn up a little list of posts I want to write. My calendar for this week looks fairly empty. I should probably be looking for a job but I will try to get some stuff up here too.

Digsby is quite cool because not only does it unite your IM accounts but it throws in your email and social networking accounts as well. So updates from Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace sit alongside your buddy list. Neat stuff. I believe support for more social networks is in the pipeline too.

Having said that, the Twitter features leave a lot to be desired. I have since started using Twhirl which I think is fantastic, save for the fact that it doesn’t open automatically when my computer starts up.

Beforehand I updated Twitter using Google Talk. But once I installed Twhirl I switched IM Twitter updates off because of course I was getting duplicate messages. But even then the problem of duplicate (or triplicate) messages did not go away. It got me thinking about the increasing trend for stuff people publish on one website to be automatically re-published elsewhere.

A lot of people I know use a Facebook application called TwitterSync. I am among them because I was screaming out for Facebook to allow this for a long time. The app automatically updates your Facebook status with your latest Twitter tweet.

This is cool because enlightened people know how great Twitter is, but there are so many more people on Facebook who do not use Twitter but could still benefit from the wise words you post on Twitter. The Facebook status is the ideal way to give your Twitter account a wider audience.

But what about those people who are friends with me on both Facebook and Twitter? They get the status updates twice. This was not so annoying beforehand. But because Digsby is hooked up to Facebook and Twitter, I get two little pop-ups telling me all about it — and this is in addition to Twhirl’s alerts.

This reminded me of a post written by Robin Hamman a couple of weeks ago. He asked, “is auto-feeding links to Twitter spammy?”

Then I came across a website called Tweet Clouds. This site produces a word cloud or heatmap of the words you use on Twitter. Three words tower above all the others: New. Blog. Post. Those three words appear at the start of each automatically generated tweet advising followers that I have just published something on my blog.

I do quite like it when people alert their followers on Twitter to the fact that they have just published a blog post. I think other people like it as well. I have just checked and over the past year Twitter has been this blog’s fifth highest referrer, bringing 888 visits. That is above Google Search and Google Search UK (although below Google Image Search and Google Image Search UK).

If you take out search engines and blog aggregators, Twitter is the second-biggest referrer to this blog (the biggest being Times Online’s blog platform, which is concentrated on just a few posts). Remember that this does not even include those who are visiting from the Twitter stream in their IM client or another application.

I often also click through when a new blog post is mentioned on Twitter if it sounds interesting enough. But I cannot stand it when other feeds are injected into a Twitter stream — people’s tumblelogs, Delicious links and the like. That is just overload.

If I was interested in someone’s Delicious links, guess what — I’d be subscribed to their Delicious feed. If I cared in the slightest about somebody’s tumblelog, I’d visit their tumblelog. Equally, however, you could say that if somebody really cared about my blog posts then there is already an adequate way to be alerted to new posts: RSS.

This problem is going to increase in the coming year as lifestreams and social aggregators such as Profilactic, FriendFeed and Socialthing! gain in popularity. In fact, these sites themselves demonstrate the problem itself rather nicely.

If you look at, for instance, my Profilactic ‘mashup’, you will see my blog posts appearing and soon afterwards the Twitter tweet announcing it. Then you will see my Delicious links repeated in a blog post (for vee8 at least). Jaiku had to be taken out because it is itself a pseudo-lifestream that already incorporates Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter and what-have-you.

Plus, Facebook has just begun to implement its own social aggregator-style features. If you already have the Delicious application installed then import your Delicious posts into your Facebook news feed, you will be getting the duplication in the Facebook news feed alone. (I tried it hoping that it would sync with Facebook’s ‘Posted Items’ feature — no such luck.)

This whole problem is summed up quite succinctly by Jon Bounds in a comment at Cybersoc:

The Facebook status, pulled from a twitter auto-announcing a blog post generated from del.icio.us links is not what I want form these services. And I get the feed of it at each stage.

It is probably time to step back, decide on which social aggregator I want to use, stick with it and stop republishing stuff on other websites. Still, I can’t help thinking that it just feels right to merge my Twitter account with my Facebook status, and it just feels right to publicise my blog posts on my Twitter account.

At the same time, it’s just not cool to read the same messages over and over again on several different websites. The internet is starting to feel like a giant echo chamber.

A lot of my readers are not so keen on F1, but it becomes an almost-exclusively F1 blog at some points during the season. Starting a separate blog allows me to post even more F1 content, while leaving my main blog for my other interests.

I have been thinking about setting up vee8 for a couple of years now. In the end I decided it was finally time to go for it. But I know that I cannot dream of reaching the same standards as some of the brilliant F1 bloggers that do such a great job already. So I won’t even try.

I will not attempt to cover every snippet of F1 news in-depth. I will not have daily posts on my latest opinions. I simply do not have the time to dedicate to it. But I will post about F1 just as often as I used to at doctorvee, if not more.

That won’t be enough to have people coming back, so I have a few plans up my sleeve.

First of all, I have an efficient way of producing a daily news post. I will be using Delicious throughout the day to collect the most interesting articles from news sites and blogs. This list will be published every day in the late afternoon to provide an overview of the day’s news. I will also keep a list of the very latest stories that have caught my attention in the sidebar. If you want to follow the links, the Delicious account is here.

Another plan is to produce my race reports using Twitter. Last year I experimented with liveblogging Grands Prix over Twitter. I will try to do the same this year as often as I can. As with the Delicious posts, at the end of each day these Twitter posts will be collected and published here. The race report will read like a lap-by-lap commentary.

I have something else up my sleeve, but I will let this blog bed in a bit before I announce it. But let’s just say, the little ’1′ next to my name isn’t just for decoration…

Speaking of which, do you like the design? It is a homage to the classic FOM graphics that ran for several years from the mid-1990s and were only ditched a few years ago. For me, this is the iconic image of Formula 1 coverage, so when I was designing this blog I couldn’t resist the nod.

Incidentally, I am a bit iffy about the URL. It is perhaps too many dots and probably too many ‘vees’. I was going to buy vee8.co.uk, but some rascal has already gone and bought it! I haven’t made my mind up about whether I am going to get a different URL for it. In the end I have decided to launch the blog here, but I might decide to move to a different address. The RSS feed has been set up with Feedburner though, so you can subscribe without having to worry about any future moves I make.

The place is still a bit bare. I am still tweaking bits and pieces all the time. I plan to bring in all the features I want to implement over the next couple of weeks. I should be into the swing of things by the time the season begins in Melbourne in two weeks.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for my preview posts which will be published shortly.

Thanks for dropping by, and I hope you choose to keep visiting throughout the season.

I’ll update this post later some time in the afternoon explaining the thinking behind it all. In the meantime, if you spot any problems or if you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.

Update: Okay, so now I have the time to post a bit about what I’ve done here.

Perhaps the first thing I should point out is the fact that, regrettably, some URLs have changed. Permalinks to posts and the like should still work perfectly. But you’ll notice that I’ve moved the pages in the navigation panel around a bit. I’ve also reorganised the categories (in fact, I haven’t quite finished that yet).

Speaking of categories, I have finally created a ‘media’ category. It never quite made sense for media posts to be listed under ‘entertainment’, particularly if I was writing about some kind of media coverage of a serious story. So I’ve gone ahead and separated them, and now television, radio and newspapers are listed under media. As such, some category URLs have also changed, so sorry about that if you had them bookmarked or something.

So why the change? Well, I am still very fond of the old design. It will probably make a reappearance somewhere — possibly on another blog. But perhaps I will release it as a WordPress theme for others to use — if I can find the time to make the appropriate tweaks to it.

Despite my pride though, I was always aware that a lot of people were not very keen on the previous design. And it has been there for almost a year. (Maybe this change will become an annual occurrence, a doctorvee Christmas tradition.)

Common complaints were about the dark background (apparently an acquired taste) and the bright links. So I’ve decided to swing back to a white background and rather more muted colours, if you can call green muted.

This is also the equivalent of growing a moustache to try and signify that you are growing up (not that many people grow moustaches these days, but you know what I mean). The previous design was deliberately jazzy and distinctive. But since then I have become a can’t-get-away-from-it adult. And in the next few months I will hopefully be finished with university.

So that means ditching the childish neon colours and adopting a serif font. I have spoken before about my devotion to Verdana, but I am afraid I have become rather tired of it. It is suffering from Times New Roman syndrome.

You know. It’s become a ubiquitous, default font. As such, it is used in so many pieces of ugly design. We have all stumbled upon badly thrown-together websites written in Verdana, just as we see too many passive aggressive notes written in Times New Roman.

I had become very keen on the recently redesigned websites for Times Online and Guardian Unlimited. Both use plenty of Georgia, so I was going to use that. Besides Times New Roman, it’s the only core serif font anyway.

But while I was designing I visited Modern Life which uses Cambria. It is basically the Vista version of Times New Roman, but lovely. I fell in love and decided to use the font on my blog. But as far as I know Cambria is only available on Vista, so for everyone else it is still Georgia.

A funny thing about Cambria is that it appears to be extraordinarily small, so the font size is rather large. But there’s nothing wrong with that I suppose.

Headings and some other bits and pieces are in Helvetica where possible, although Windows users (including me!) will have to make do with Arial. I know it’s a bit clichéd, and rather too ubiquitous, but you never grow tired of it. I do love Helvetica so I was keen to use it when I decided to give the blog a cleaner design.

I suppose now is a good time to talk about the general inspiration for the redesign. I was tempted to go back to a clinical, Helvetica-led design when I first saw screenshots for the new beta version of Delicious. Delicious is a very apt word. Mind you, the end result on this blog has ended up looking very little like the Delicious screenshots.

A more direct inspiration has been the beautifully-designed Lokesh Dhakar website. In fact, parts of this blog’s design have turned out to be embarrassingly similar. I first came across his blog when I read this guide to different kinds of coffee and it instantly struck me as an excellent design.

Layout-wise, I very much went for the ‘less is more’ approach. This has meant compromises in places, but I’ll go on to that. The main change is that I’ve moved away from a three column layout to two columns. I had read somewhere that multiple columns just confuse people, which makes sense. So it’s back to one sidebar.

I was keen to get everything lined up nicely with each other. This does make it look quite neat, but one problem is that the main column is quite close to the sidebar. The solution was to have a neat line running along the left of the sidebar, although I’m still not sure if it is enough. I toyed with using full justification, but decided in the end that the cons outweighed the pros.

Despite the intimate position of the main column and the sidebar, the page is wider than before. Making good use of the space available and all that. As such, the design only really works if your screen is at least 1024 pixels wide. But the same was true of the previous design. And people with smaller screens make up around 3% of this blog’s visitors. Sorry to those 3%, but the rest of us just get masses of white space.

On to the content. One thing you’ll notice is that categories are now taking pride of place above every single post. They used to be hidden away, only appearing in the sidebar of single post pages.

The reason I’ve made them more prominent is because over the years I have become more and more guilty about the fact that this blog is a bit of a ragbag of different topics. And the Formula 1 posts in particular are beginning to overshadow everything else. So having the category as the first thing of every post is just a heads-up for everyone, so that you know what the post is about and you can easily skip the posts you aren’t interested in.

Another new addition is subtitles. I saw this on a few other blogs and really liked the idea, so I’m going to give it a go. Inspired by this article, I did it using custom fields, a feature of WordPress that I have never really explored before.

Gone from the top of the post, however, are the date and the comments link. The date still appears there on single posts, but I am thinking of including them everywhere again. I already feel a bit lost without them (although I didn’t use dates much on any of the designs I used before the previous one).

I am also open to putting the comments link back up there, although the link still appears at the bottom of the post as expected. Any comments on this would be appreciated.

I have also taken the plunge and decided to add a ShareThis button, despite what I wrote about it a few months ago. I’m still experimenting with the position of this, so any ideas would be welcome.

Over to the sidebar. I’ve reduced the amount of stuff that’s there to a bare minimum. The latest comment is still there as I like to highlight the great discussions that go on in the comments, which is really what blogging is all about.

Twitter is still there, although I’ve reduced it to just the latest update rather than the last three. Delicious too has been reduced to just the five most recent links. I normally post to Delicious more often than five times a day, so this might be a bit odd. But there is method to my madness.

I made a decision a short while ago that this blog should concentrate mainly on original content. That’s just the way the blog has evolved, and I don’t really like to fob people off with YouTube clips all the time.

But it’s good to highlight interesting websites and videos. After all, that was the original meaning of the word ‘weblog’, celebrating its tenth anniversary this week. So I will create another home for them. Probably a tumblelog, but I will get round to that later.

The other prominent feature on the main page (and, indeed, every page, the big whore that I am) is adverts. An early version of this design had the adverts appearing in a garish green colour scheme, but I screwed my head on enough to revert to a more sane grey version. I am ridiculously proud of having the idea of paying homage to Associated-Rediffusion, which wouldn’t really have worked with the green scheme.

The part of the design I am most worried about is the comments. For some reason, I always find the comments section the most difficult to design, and this time was no different.

I decided to move the comment author information to the left of the comment rather than above. Part of this was to get the full size of the Gravatar displayed, which would take up too much room if you have it above. It is also a layout familiar to message board users, so no real issue there.

There is a problem, however, if somebody has quite a long word in their name. In a recent example, Bellgrovebelle is cut off, although there are worse examples. Thankfully, these are quite rare and hopefully not too distracting.

As has already been noted by Ollie in the comments to this post, there is an inconsistency between the sizes of the Gravatars and the Identicons. I’ve not worked too hard on this yet, although my attempts so far have only produced pixellated-looking Identicons. I am working on it though.

Other features I’m thinking about adding to the comments section are favicons and OpenID.

In the pages (about, archives, etc.) I have also removed a lot of stuff that I didn’t really consider important any more. I’m thinking of completely uninstalling the post popularity plugin as this blog now has a post ratings system which I prefer. As for the other stuff, see if you can work out what’s gone. I doubt anyone will be too upset.

One last thing. I am using some icons from the Silk set by Fam Fam Fam. I’ve still not quite finished this aspect of the design, as I’m not sure which bits should have icons and which shouldn’t.

I think that just about covers it. Sorry this post went on for so long. I would be grateful to hear any comments or ideas. And of course, if something seems broken then please let me know about it!