on time and blogging

Cristian is wondering 'where do we find time to blog' in a recent blog entry. Good question. I am not sure. My guess is that I spend anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 hour a day, depending on what I'm writing about. One thing I do over the day is to leave open several mozilla tabs as I find things that I'd like to link to... and then I let the ideas evolve through the day. At some point I just post the comment...

I don't think that time is the problem, rather, it's a question of how we like to express what we think, and if we are naturally inclined to write. Some people find it easier than others I think, and for many it's actually part of the thought process.

That little calendar on the top does seem to create a certain pressure to "produce" though, which I think is bad. Blogging should be fun, as Russ said recently. And that means it should be done at your own pace. I've been noticing that more blogs are dispensing with the calendar, and I think that's a good alternative when posting is sparse. Quantity can never replace quality, specially when "quality" is measured by how much we enjoy the process.

As usual when I write about blogging, I end up with the feeling that I'm not even scratching the surface. All sorts of ideas come to mind, connections, and so on.... leaves me a bit unsatisfied, but I guess that's good. We are only scratching the surface. Since what "blogging" means is constantly evolving, our understanding, expectations, and ideas of it also change quickly. We'll just have to keep on riding the wave.

the rise of inktomi

Over the past two weeks or so, Inktomi slurp, the Inktomi spider, has massively increased its activity. Over a few days, it quickly outstripped the activity of Googlebot in my server, while only a few weeks ago Googlebot was indexing the site about 10 times more often than the nearest competitor (which was, as it happens, Inktomi), now Inktomi is indexing with twice the frequency of Googlebot on average--only for today, for example, my stats page reports 318 hits from Inktomi slurp while Googlebot has no hits at all.

It seems that Yahoo! is gearing up for a fight with you-know-who... (not entirely unexpected, althought there are some doubts).

Has anyone else seen this? Or is it just a stats-induced hallucination?

quote of the day

"Fuck the regulations!"

--From The legend of 1900.

So much of this movie keeps resonating long after you've seen it (not my case, I saw it again a few weeks ago). I've had this line (and most of the movie actually) in my head for days. It doesn't want to get out! Let's see if writing it down can exorcise it.

high security?

A Wired article on the security problems of Los Alamos National Laboratory:

There are no armed guards to knock out. No sensors to deactivate. No surveillance cameras to cripple. To sneak into Los Alamos National Laboratory, the world's most important nuclear research facility, all you do is step over a few strands of rusted, calf-high barbed wire.

I should know. On Saturday morning, I slipped into and out of a top-secret area of the lab while guards sat, unaware, less than a hundred yards away.

A few weeks ago, The Economist ran a related article on Los Alamos with the headline "Next stop for Blix? - Even America has a hard time keeping track of its arms programmes", and said:

IT BUILDS weapons of mass destruction. And it cannot account for dozens of computers and hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of other equipment. Were the goings-on that have lately been exposed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to be uncovered in Iraq, the United Nations weapons inspectors would pounce on them with a furious cry.

Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were built, is in as bad a crisis as it has known since the end of the cold war. This time the concern is not about its fundamental job; indeed, the realisation that the world has not been made safe by the collapse of communism, and that there are still explosive dangers out there, has put a spring back in the step of nuclear-weapons designers. The current trouble is about that familiar old villain, simple mismanagement.

editing -- or lie?

Via an entry from Scott, I found out about an ongoing discussion regarding an email sent by Laurie Garret (Who wrote The coming plague, an excellent book on which I commented last year) to her friends reporting 'candindly' (to say the least) about what she saw and heard at the World Economic Forum at Davos. The main problem seems to be that Garret wasn't willing to actually publish the contents of the email--or that's what it appears since she was apparently outraged that what she said was being made public, rather than the text itself. As Scott puts it:

I'm sure it was upsetting to Garrett to find that words she intended for a small group got broadcast online. I don't envy her. But I think what irked a lot of people on the Net was the feeling they got that the story she told her friends was very different from the one she was likely to tell readers of her "official" work.

Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people feel that reporters know a lot more than what they actually put in their stories -- that the "real story" of our times is the one that reporters tell each other over beers, and in for-private-distribution-only e-mails, rather than the one they tell in their formal stories.

The Garrett episode seemed to confirm that. Here was a journalist returning from "hobnobbing" with the global elite and announcing that "the world isn't run by a clever cabal. It's run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power."

Her e-mail is a casual, unvarnished and sometimes blunt assessment of the poor state of the world ("The global economy is in very very very very bad shape"). With a little editing, it could have turned into a good magazine column. For all I know, that was Garrett's intention. But her reaction of outrage and violation at the viral-like spread of the e-mail suggests otherwise -- and reinforces readers' hunch that they've just gotten a fleeting glimpse of how journalists talk to each other when they think the mike is turned off.

Indeed.