Vonnegut:
It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
I really need to read these repeatedly. Like every day. Several times.
Zapier is a new plumbing tool for the web. It connects a huge variety of web apis together. I’m likely to stick with IFTTT for now, but I wish they would announce a business plan already. Zapier has one that looks reasonable.
James Somers:
When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me. That’s because everything I perceive will unconsciously engage on its way in with the substance of my preoccupation.
An interesting idea: A blogging platform built on top of Tent.io.
It’s easy for me to get caught up in the outrage. There’s so much to go around. Twitter is evil. Maps are bad. AT&T is evil. Windows 8 is a disaster. Apple is evil.
It’s time for a deep breath. In reality, none of these things are my problems. They have not impacted me directly one bit. I haven’t seen a Twitter ad or promoted tweet. My Twitter apps still work exactly the same.
Marcelo Somers is celebrating the one year anniversary of the The Syndicate Network this week. For anyone that is not aware, Marcelo runs The Syndicate as a side business and has a limited number of sites he works with. It’s an approach I like.
Marcelo is writing a lessons-learned retrospective that’s very interesting. It’s not so much about marketing as it is about starting a small business. Here’s a high level overview that I think tells a compelling story all on its own:
I’ve been using Checkvist for the past week and I love it. Checkvist is a web app for outlining and working with lists. It’s been designed for the plain text nerds and sports powerful keyboard navigation.
Checkvist isn’t a replacement for Markdown. It embraces it. Any text in an outline can be formatted with Markdown. Already have an outline written in Markdown? Just paste it right in through the import popup.
Marco:
Why do Tent and App.net try to be so much more than a status-message network? What’s wrong with just doing the hell out of status messages with basic metadata support? (Works great for Twitter, and they’re not even doing a good job of it anymore.)
I agree. Maybe they need to create a “value proposition” beyond a social network. I don’t think that’s a winning strategy.1
I’m on Tent.
I like where this Amazon acquisition of Audible is going. Seamlessly switch between an audio book and Kindle eBook with Whispersync.
I have high hopes for this service. If it works, it’s an unbeatable combination that I will pay more for.
Since moving this site to a static blog, I’ve developed a better perspective on meta data. When I was on WordPress, I assumed the platform would handle all of my meta data. Occasionally I added a custom field but for the most part, I was ignorant of my future needs and what WordPress would handle for me.
Working in a static blog like Pelican has made me much more aware of how I draft a post and what meta data I include.
