Rubénerd Blog :)

I’m socially awkward, anxious, terribly shy and I tend to obsess about obscure and unconventional things, but I was like that before I started blogging! That notwithstanding, Dave Winer has an excellent post on Scripting News about the stereotypes surrounding bloggers in Hollywood movies.

Read this post >

I was asked a question yesterday from someone other than a person from high school who had almost never spoken to me unless they had a computer problem, so for once I felt obligated to answer. Zombie Plan (yes, THAT ZombiePlan) wanted to know how it is I can blog so much and where I get my ideas from.

There are two ways to address the question, the first is the academic way. I am able to blog so much because I endeavour to discover new and exciting fields of study both in my life and in the world around me and therefore I am able to produce blog posts of a high calibre and social value for my readers. As with most academic answers of this nature though, this reason is a lot of hot air and complete nonsense.

As I’ve said many times here over the years I find blogging a fun distraction from studying and work, I guess you could call it a coping mechanism. It may sound counter-intuitive, but often I blog the most when I have the most amount of work to do! When I’m distracted, my brain can come up with more material. Perhaps when said brain is stimulated it’s thinks better, alas I’m no Sam Harris neurologist I’m only interpreting the results in my own frame of reference.

The other thing to try is not something if you’re a serious person attempting to write a serious blog. Write nonsense! I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets tired of reading dry, impersonal posts on blogs; buck the trend and put material in posts regarding your own life and experiences when you talk about things. Recently I took this one step further by having a dedicated nonsense category where I can put fun silliness. I remember when I used to work for Discovery Channel as a voice over guy one of the things the director said is that people can tell when you speak whether or not you’re smiling just by listening; I reckon the same could be said for blogging.

And while I’m giving away my super duper secrets, my other trick is to just go online and find silly or completely random pictures, often they trigger something in my head and I can write about something. I try to have at least one image associated with each post because I feel text-only blogs kinda defeat the purpose of having a website on the multimedia intertubes anyway. While we’re talking about triggers I also have a notebook page on my iTelephone for blog and show topics too which I frantically jot nonsense into whenever I get the chance.

I almost forgot! The other thing is I create the vast majoraty of my blog posts in coffee shops; in Adelaide I sit at the Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes, in Singapore I sit at any number of Starbucks Coffee thingys. Don’t ask me why I’m more productive or mentally stimulated in places like that, because I don’t know the answer myself!

Is my blog a good one? Heavens no, it’s awful! But that wasn’t the question, Zombie Plan wanted to know how I blog so much. I hope this sheds some light onto it. Do lights have fur?

After hearing for years about how blogging was going to revolutionise the way we read and publish information, it seems thesedays most blogs dealing with specific technologies have consolidated into "megasites" run by dozens of people. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it means if most folks want to read about news, reviews and opinions on iPhones for example they hit the same few sites that rehash the same material as each other and that’s it.

With this in mind I present to you my dear reader iPhoneUserNews which if you can’t figure out what it’s about from the title I find your comprehension skills both scary and fascinating at the same time. It’s run and managed by the same Neal behind the IntoYourHead show from the Emerald Isle. At least that’s where he claims to be, he could be posting messages from a base in Antarctica or one of Saturn’s moons for all I know. Apparently he likes frigidly cold climates.

If you’re fed up with reading the same stuff about everybody’s favourite phone from the same few sites (you know the ones of which I speak) you may want to check it out. I was paid off several billion Euros to promote this site, but that shouldn’t in any way put you off anything I wrote here about it. You can also follow along on The Twitters.

Thank you, and good morning. Or whatever time of day it happens to be for you and the internet device upon which you’re reading this. I say that because the time on your internet device may be incorrect and you may assume the time is different. I’m clever aren’t I? Don’t answer that.

The incompetent internets episode!

Moving lots of blogs into one blog; people like Zombie Plan and Neal from IntoYourHead going the opposite ways; working and living places after university; iTelephone cases and downloading; The Googles and I losing track of core competencies; too much self respect to use Chandler Bing and vacuous people getting angry at Twitter for losing spam followers!

Download MP3 to listen 19:18 8.9MiB

You can also view previous episodes, subscribe via iTunes or another client, stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.

The half-arsed half episode!

Clock and calendar silliness; the Queen’s Birthday isn’t the Queen’s Birthday; Queen Elizabeth’s mugshot on Australian coins; blogging about FreeBSD desktop background managers; the de facto one episode a month show; people whinging about too many blog posts; Zombie Plan on useless tweets; MannyTheMailman’s brand new air conditioner; Asia Pacific being ahead of Hawaii; iPhone Apple WWDC speculation; Neal O’Carroll and I suing for the iTelephone name; Elke’s lack of tweets; the world is flat; illegal Dutch pot scenarios and zombies eating skittles.

Download MP3 to listen 12:30 5.9MiB

You can also view previous episodes, subscribe via iTunes or another client, stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.

The superfluous is very necessary.
~ Voltaire

This is exactly what I’ve been saying all along.

As a person who reads tens of blogs on a daily basis through various aggregators, I can say with confidence that posts which include graphics, photos, diagrams, real world experience, humility and a sense of humour along with the text are so much more interesting and engaging and will make me come back for more. There’s a topic for a killer novel there.

I also prefer reading posts that are conversational rather than just dry text — if I wanted the latter I’d pick up one of my university textbooks. Such people are missing out on what I consider to be the core strength of the internet: presenting varying and diverse content. What’s the point of changing mediums while being tied to the limitations of what you used before?

ASIDE: I didn’t think this one quote from Voltaire would turn into a rant about the boring state of blogging. Perhaps I could see it coming subconciously and my mind tricked me into posting it to set this in motion. Motion rhymes with horseshoe. Wait… no it doesn’t.

I suspect much of this stems from the fact many people just don’t consider comedy, humour, comedy, photos, personal experience or a sense of humour professional; how stuffy. People like why the lucky stiff push the envelope in randomness, quirky sidebars, diverging threads of conciousness and awesome graphics alongside his text, but he’s in a minority. As in a one in a million minority. It’s a shame.

All this I’ve said before; what I’m fascinated with is that Voltaire was a blogger and understood this. Do you reckon his blog is still online after all this time? The Internet Archives might be the place to look. What was his webhost? Did he have translations of his posts? Did he have hairstyle instructions?