I just read Mark Artrip’s latest life update post and among the other items he mentioned that he refused to believe that twitter was cool. I do agree with his point about it breaking down into the most mundane details about peoples life, however I do like a steady stream of stuff to read and keep track of.

I dabbled with twitter for a while and then realized that it would only be cool if I was a web developer in New York or San Francisco and hung out with all kinds of bleeding edge Technorati, which I am not, do not, and do not. However, despite my friends all not being OCD or egotistical enough to post everything about themselves has not detracted my desire to track lots of things going on all throughout the day. Presenting my solution.

Here is the combination that I use to get my fix of constantly updated relevant news in an easy to read visual format. RSS Menu, Amigo, Growl. Now you might think that I was issuing commands at you friend but I was not. Click on those links or just read below for how I integrate their functions to make my desktop the most up to date relevant place for me.

RSS Menu is great. I have become a huge fan of subscribing to RSS feeds from blogs and news sources over the last six months. This is for me the best way to stay current on things that I care about. Whether it is the New York Yankees Headlines feed or the latest Apple rumors, I let other people do the hard work looking up and researching all of their crazy stuff and then cherry pick off the stuff that i care about.

I also use a program called Amigo which is billed as a Facebook notification program. It does exactly what it says and you get a little pop up every time one of your friends updates their status on Facebook which I must say for some of you is way to often for you to actually be doing any work when you say you are working. I do wish that it would let you do your own updates without having to go into the site, but maybe they will roll it out in another version. Something that I should tell you about this software is that it is kind of free. Actually, as long as you don’t mind being reminded every time you start up your computer how long you have been using Amigo without registering it, then it is free. I think it has been about 130 days or something like that. Let me do updates from my desktop and I will how about that.

Finally, there is the thing that makes both of these apps worth while. The Growl notification system plugin. This is definitely free although I do not know why. It is so handy for so many things. The way that this ties together is that every time one of these two programs updates or there is a new post or anything, a simple drop down (entirely customizable in the looks department) comes out of my menu bar with something like “new article for Uncrate” or “Nathaniel DeZago is in Afghanistan” or whatever. This is quite literally the program that keeps me up to date on everything because otherwise I would not know what is going on with all of my friends. Everyone posts on Facebook sometime, even the slackers out there like me and if you were using this, then you would know right away rather than the next time you actually take the time to go to Facebook. I also find that it is a good way to sort out if you want to take the time to go to a website or not. Since you can get a preview of the articles and headlines, I do not need to physically go to the blog and can keep right on working for real rather than going to check a news feed and then being disappointed.

So this is my Twitter. Sure it is not actually Twitter, but it is how I keep in touch with the constantly updating in real time world that I live in. Let me know what solutions you use for your own situation.

So the question of who do we actually write for was posed by Mark Artrip in a comment this morning. Also there is Jason Rice’s most recent post that addresses the issue of bringing out your own personality in a blog and deciding how much to really care. Really, I do not have any answer to the questions yet but maybe I can work through it quickly and for your own amusement. I think there are a couple of scenarios that I will explore before I define this whole blogging thing for myself.

1. I write this for other tech nerds. Sure there is the discussion about who should be called nerd or geek or whatever, or even if the nerd label has gotten “too cool” as was mentioned in this last issue of Wired magazine. I think that the problem with writing for tech nerds would be that tech people already dominate the internet in almost every way imaginable so what do I really have to add that is not somewhere else? Any foray into making this an actual tech blog would result in 200 links to sources in every post and that is way too much work for my level of dedication to this blogging endeavor.
2. I write this for general consumption. This is a strong contender because I do consider myself at least semi-well rounded in a lot of different areas. Over enough time I think that I will have probably covered a very broad spectrum of categories and part of my hope would be that I could offer some small additional insight or perspective to whatever it is that I am talking about at that moment. Maybe I am not really cool enough or have enough “experience” or whatever to have anybody listen to me but I don’t care. Whatever.
3. I write this for my friends. I subscribe to several different blogs of close friends and I find it interesting to keep in touch this way. I do not have to feel bad about not calling and really when you think about it, blogging is just long-hand multi-media capable texting. I think a primary purpose is to let my friends, especially long distance ones, know how things are going in my life.
4. I write this for myself. Maybe this is the acceptable nerdy way of keeping a diary, or at least fulfilling the same purpose in a physiological sense that writing in a diary would meet. Does that mean that I am going to spew forth my thoughts unfiltered to the whole world? Certainly not. Does it mean that I can use this place as a space to quickly post my thoughts on a subject for quick reference at a later point? Absolutely.

Recently I posted about how much I like the Raconteurs new album Consolers of the Lonely. Nice little post. In an off the cuff sort of way I said:

Ok so I am not as huge a fan of music as my good friend Mark Artrip but I do have a bigger iTunes music library…not that I’m keeping track.

Now I did not necessarily mean for that to start a “mine is bigger than yours contest” because I thought that it would just be accepted at face value by whomever chose to read my blog. I now realize that Mark does take music much more seriously than I do and so he commented:

wait a minute, I would like to know how big your itunes library is? and if it is bigger than mine, I would like to know how much of that music you obtained legally. I like to think that I have one of the biggest legal libraries around….all terrible christian music from back in the day….but still:)

Now I will say to start off with that a blog on the internet popular or not is probably not the best place for anyone to quantify or justify the status of what is contained in their collection of media no matter what the format. What I will say is that I have never counted a library that way because honestly, I have moved my music around so much to so many different computers and in different formats that I am not sure anyone could really tell what is from where other than what I have bought from the iTMS itself. So for just the sake of defining legality lets say that only songs purchased from iTunes count since if you believe the record labels importing off of your own cds breaks copyright since it constitutes a change in format and is thus illegal. In that arguement I have 156 songs which take up 562.7MB of space and would take 9.5 hours to listen to. Not that much. Here are screengrabs of my overall library.

A lot of this actually has been ripped off of CDs or DVDs that I owned (and since got rid of because CDs take up space) at one time. Most of the stuff that I got in college has been long since deleted as my overall storage capacity expanded or contracted. I will say that changing from a desktop to a laptop prompted me to unload a huge amount of content both in the tv shows area and in music. Things like the entire audio books for the LOTR trilogy added a ridiculous number of tracks and play time to the stats. I have also been getting rid of a lot of albums that quite frankly I will never listen to again and am not even sure where they came from. 

As a wrap up to this post about music and libraries let me include a link to an amazing post that I read this morning on this very subject. Below is one of my favorite quotes from it but you can read the whole thing here if you want.

Because of the availability of music online, a very strict social hierarchy has been created within white culture whereby someone with a large MP3 collection is considered “normal,” a large CD collection is considered to be “better,” and a person with a large vinyl collection is recognized as “elite.”