On of my favorite Seinfeld episodes is the one in which George’s two worlds collide. It’s the one where “Relationship George” and “Independent George” battle it out for supremacy, with the ultimate battle coming at a movie theater, where George’s fiancé Susan, Jerry, and Elaine have gone to a movie without him. George arrives late, and stands up in front of the wrong movie yelling angrily, until someone tells him that the same movie is playing on a different screen and maybe he should try there. He’s thrown out of the theater, dragged away by security.

The main conflict of the episode is that George knows what will happen when his two worlds collide: “Relationship George will kill Independent George”. Obviously, however, this difference is only in George’s mind, where there is a clear separation between his love life and his life among friends. It appeals to us because we somehow feel awkward when in the same situation: I certainly remember when I introduced my wife to my family and friends…I was pretty anxious. (thankfully, it turned out great)

The Seinfeld episode is analogous to the current non-struggle we’re having between our “digital life” and our “real life”. Our “digital life” is made up of blogs, email, subscription feeds, and aggregators. Our “real life” is, apparently, everything else.

Continue Reading: The Non-collision of Relationship and Independent George

Derek Powazek on gatekeepers:

“So now, my fellow bloggers, I beseech you: Ignore the numbers. Ignore the lists. Blog what you love and the rest will follow. Everything else is just noise.”

One lens through which to look at the recent innovation in the memetracker space is frustration. If you look at where the frustration is in how we track memes (ideas), you can get a decent picture of where the innovation is going. If you want to predict the future, find the frustration!

Like an antelope eating grass on the Kalahari, grazing is eating small quantities of food at frequent but irregular intervals (Apple Dashboard dictionary). Recently, the term grazing has been adopted to describe our efforts at finding information on the Web. The following is a very general picture of the four types of “grazing” we’ve gone through, or are going through now. Each level had it’s own share of frustration, which led (or is leading) directly to the next level.

Continue Reading: The Evolution of Information Grazing

Robert Scoble:

“My blog is MY garden. I love this trend. Let me do more from my blog, no matter where I am.”

I agree completely. 3rd party hosted software is great, unless you have a blog that can do the same thing. I would much rather have some service built into my blog than have it exist on someone else’s servers.

Here’s an example: Imagine if I want to create a list of movies, and I want complete control over it. Should I create a wiki, a tadalist, a Vood2do blog, a list on Google Base, a Gmail account, or should I use my blog?

I would put it on my blog. But don’t get me wrong…it is apparent that networked services will grow tremendously, but there will always be a tension between what the best services offer and what is built as a plugin to a blog. It seems that most first features come out in networked software, then they’re cloned and put into blog software.

I have my own networked cloud that I can (or will be able to) use for synchronizing, searching, backing up, and whatever else. My domain. My web services. My blog.

The modern-day Gutenberg responds to the 455! comments left after it was discovered he had a blog:

“I just played my part. I built on the work of others — the Internet, invented 20 years before the web, by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn and colleagues, for example, and hypertext, a word coined by Ted Nelson for an idea of links which was already implemented in many non-networked systems. I just put these technologies together. And then, it all took off because of this amazing community of enthusiasts, who have done such incredible things with the technology, and are still advancing it in so many ways.”

He’s also building the Semantic Web himself.

And he thinks you should have your own URI!!!

By the way: here’s Tim’s feed.

Scott Karp is having trouble getting linked. The other day the proprietor of Publishing 2.0 and managing director of research and strategy for Atlantic Media admitted that despite emailing influential bloggers (Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis, and Steve Rubel), he’s been unable to get them to link to his site.

Continue Reading: In the Blogging World You Don’t Have Sex on the First Date

Seth writes a fantastic post detailing his thoughts about self-promotion on blogs. This is blogging at its best, folks, when you ask important questions honestly, and earnestly.

Promotion, self-promotion and [insert ad here]

Joe Reger, with whom Alex Barnett and I did a podcast last week, and Phil Pearson, both take me to task for omissions in my article on Structured Blogging.

Joe points out that I completely missed one of the major reasons to datablog: personal data mining. For example, let’s say you’re a runner. Joe’s software will allows people who run to input things like running times and graph those times over the course of a month or year. You can quickly and easily monitor your progress (or lack of it). This personal value has little to do with the value to the network that I was talking about….

Continue Reading: Learning More about Structured Blogging

David Newberger recently interviewed me about blogging. He published it this morning.

Here’s the interview: 10 Questions with Joshua Porter

I feel like I’m in pretty good company. David recently interviewed Robert Scoble and Doc Searls…

And by the way, it was the first time that I had used Writely other than to kick the tires. I’m really impressed with it as a collaboration tool. The auto-save feature made me smile…

Part 2 of the podcast Alex Barnett and I had with Marc Canter and Joe Reger is now available. In it, Marc Canter riffs about OPML, the Compatibility Box approach, and calls Structured Blogging the “next era of blogging”.

• Part 1 mp3 and Notes
• Part 2 (13:26 - 12.3MB mp3)

Continue Reading: Structured Blogging Podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger, Part 2