I want to testify about how Blogging Has Changed My Life. This will be a multi-part entry.
First of all, we subscribe to the Denver Post, the NY Times and the Boulder Daily Camera and get them every day. (I have subscribed to the NY Times on and off for about forty years, mainly on. When I was stationed on Okinawa in 1969-70, I got the Sunday NY Times mailed to me, delivered on Tuesday a week after it was published.) My wife reads all of them and I read the Times and Camera about 1/3 of the time. I read less of the Times than I used to because when they write about something that I know about, the writeup is often flawed and slanted so I am skeptical about the topics that I don't know about. I also read about 60 blogs a day. This doesn't include the links I follow. (My SWAG is about another 15) This takes about a couple of hours. I use furl and slogger to keep track of those stories I want to remember. (Technical Details below).
I never watch Network television News and haven't for more than 5 minutes since 9/11. (We live in a post 9/11 world and they can kiss my ass. Tape at Eleven) Basically, their bandwidth is too low. That is, in the minute it takes to watch a news story, I can read the transcripts of 10 stories to say nothing of their low level of information. Try it, some time, read an article on something you know a lot about. Or watch it on the news. That's also ignoring the slant which is enough to swear off TV News.
My blog reading is the equivalent of reading about 100 columns by David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, or David Broder a day. Well not equivalent, but let's call it the equivalent text volume.
I end up sending about half a dozen links to friends and find increasingly that I will have a conversation with someone about some topic and then over the next week find about half a dozen articles on the topic. (Recent topics include whether US war dead in Iraq are from small towns or urban areas, what's wrong with the ISG, and whether Racism Is The GOP Baseism.)
Now, most people dismiss me as just surfing the net but to me it is like my wife who spends about three hours a day reading.
(her current reading)
She reads much better stuff than I do but then she doesn't watch TV so she has a lot more time. She also doesn't read fiction, meaning novels other than literature. She is 1/3 of the way through Remembrances of Things Past.
Anyhow, all this blog reading makes me more aware of and more knowledgeable about the world, in a way, that is, using technology unavailable two years ago. I will leave the question of whether it is just cat videos to others.
Topics for the future: What does this mean in my life? What are the technologies hard, soft and wet ware that make it possible ?
Technology Details:
I have been using furl for a long time to keep track of web pages I want to remember (5222 entries) turns out you can download them including copies of the web pages http://www.furl.net/... so I did, unzipped (302 mb) and a couple of hours later they were in my google desktop index, I then started using slogger http://www.kenschutte.com/... which also copies a nice webpage and creates a web index
http://marcsobel.com/... with no discernible delay in contrast with furl which takes about 20 seconds but has better commenting facilities.
long story, I click one button and save every web page I might want to remember. I figure I will never run out of hard drive storage.
Lots of external brainpack memory.