And it appears to be a long time gone

So, it’s been a while since I’ve even posted a link dump, with my last couple of posts being hastily written status updates to check out a new app or to help a friend run for political office. There’s a lot of reasons behind that, this month in particular, and I’ll get to some of them. But one of the reasons was simply a crisis of faith in my editorial stance, propelled by two excellent reads from the month – Warren Ellis’s post The Patchwork Years, and the Big Contrarian’s Tacky.

“The world does not need another linkblog,” Ellis writes in a discussion of the crazy web years of 2001-2007. He’s talking about the explosion of content that’s been enabled by the growth of personal weblogs, the boon of social media networks such as MySpace and Facebook, content hosts like YouTube and Flickr, and more. For a while, curating this was a necessary, useful role. When I think of the curated internet I think first and foremost of kottke.org, from whom a lot of the content here originates. He’s a day-one kind of blogger and for a long time was directing me to some of the best of the web – along with MetaFilter, BoingBoing, and others.

The thing is, while the world may not need another linkblog, it seemed like my likely readers did, or did from me. I’m frequently asked about what I’m reading and more often than not these days I’ll reply with something from my Reader, not a book. Regardless, even though I like the links I’ve been posting, people weren’t clicking through on them, they lacked cohesion of any sort, and other than being able to publish as soon as I had a dozen or so to go with, there’s been nothing particularly appealing about them.

In Tacky, Jack Shedd is talking about the problogging industry, in which I am not actor but spectator, but still found valuable ideas. “There are only three requirements I’ve ever sussed out from reading excellent sites. Write well, write often, and write with passion. It seems if you can manage that, you’ll find an audience,” he writes. Well, I’d like to think I write well, with all the passion summable, although I’m certainly not writing often. And I do want an audience, certainly, one beyond my friends and family and online networks, so I’m well suited to follow his advice. I don’t want to be immersed in the narcissistic parade of self-congratulation a lot of the blog world is, but I am interested in at least having people know my name.

So where does that leave me? Certainly, I need to find a balance of publishing schedules – enough to let people like my dad know I’m still here and keep the front page fresh, but not one so rigorous that I’m publishing crap for the sake of hitting Submit. I do want to do links to the external but not be tacky about it, which isn’t much of an issue unless I really start looking for a bigger audience. But I also want to provide some documentation of my life and thoughts, not just those of others. The thing is, there are a lot of ways for me to share content now – Google Reader, FriendFeed, Twitter and more – and it’s not always easiest or best to put them here. So look for less frequent content, but hopefully more to say than just what Kottke, Waxy and a few others had already found interesting.

Anyway, some updates that should but may or may not get their own post. July has been a busy but great month. I made it camping three weekends out of four, including Wright’s Beach in Sonoma State Park for the 4th of July, a private campground near Guerneville for which I need to track down info, and this last weekend in Big Basin State Park near Santa Cruz, which included 11 miles of excellent hiking, waterfalls, huge redwoods, and more. I also accepted a full-time position with Yelp and have agreed to sell my interest in ecomentum, which surely deserves a post of its own. There’s a post’s worth of my new favorite apps for the iPhone, certainly, and there will be others about two weddings I’m heading to soon – Emily and Drew next weekend in upstate New York, followed by Johnny and Sheri here in San Francisco in September. There’s an upcoming recap of my month in spending and some of the tools and lessons I’ve learned.

Which, to me, sounds a lot like “I still don’t know where this site is going.” True enough, at least not until a few more things settle out in the new job and routines. I’ve felt restricted enough by the free side of WordPress to look into investing in hosting, etc, but that’s money I need to be certain can be well-spent before I commit. Keep checking back and I’ll keep trying to improve.

And now, on to all the links I’ve saved in draft over the last three weeks or so:

• Is the word nabe ok? (More importantly, is the self-referential circle of some of my internet friends at times oddly hilarious and goofy? Yes).
• As a followup to my notes on budgeting last month, How to Open Multiple Accounts at ING Direct.
• I use a lot of computers – one at my desk at home, the laptop downstairs occasionally, my work machine, the iPhone, as well as being likely to check stuff on someone else’s computer sometimes – and often forget to log out of sites. Google now lets you sign out remotely if you need to, and see if other people are accessing your stuff. Neat.
• 50 things being blamed on rising gas prices. I like lists.
• Online acquaintance Matthew Baldwin made a muxtape of songs about nuclear war, called Back In the Day When We All Thought We’d Die.
• A pretty cool story from the folks at Pixar treating a customer right, in the middle of a dense argument on Wall-E (so yes, I’m pulling content fron an article I haven’t read about a movie I haven’t seen).
• Brittney linked me to a funny Wikipedia screenshot following the confession of Hans Reiser, who earlier this month led police to the body of the wife he killed. He’s a well-known Linux developer who I first heard about a year ago in this story, and there’s nothing really funny about it except for crass Internet humor.
• I think “Everything for a reason” is bs, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t ring true in this beautiful essay by Caitlin Burke.
• We’ve had a lot of fires throughout California this summer, and one of them claimed my favorite swim spot for at least the next year. Fortunately there’s a website to tell me where to find more – nationwide!
• The State of the Web, summer 2008.
• Oh No My Money combines two things I love: financial tracking and graphs.
• A profile of a well-known San Francisco face – Owen Dias, Powell Street’s No Sex Guy. He’s not the legend Frank Chu is, but I think most people would know him.