1,000 Books

LibraryThing is an online database (for books) that launched in August 2005. I started using it a month later and in the ensuing 19 years have cataloged 1,000 books. I always have a book close at hand but I am not a fast reader. I love to read and do so for a couple of hours every day. Perhaps my favorite pastime. And I can’t think of anything that would tell you more about who I am and what I’m interested in than the books I have read.

Fiction gets most of my reading time (692 titles) but in recent years I have developed a taste for nonfiction (245 titles). Together, the work of 351 authors. Most popular:

Robert B. Parker (51), John Sandford (46), Michael Connelly (36), Lawrence Block (32), Elmore Leonard (28), Sue Grafton (23), John D. Macdonald (23), Ross Thomas (21), Robert Crais (19), Mick Herron (17), Bill Granger (15), John Grisham (15), William Gibson (14), Carl Hiaasen (14), Neal Stephenson (13), elson DeMille (12)

I give each entry in the database one or more tags and that probably provides the clearest picture of my interests. (Note: tagging is more art than science)

I purchase most of the books I read because I love highlighting passages which was one of the main reasons I started a blog in 2002. When I finish a book I transcribe the highlighted passages into a Google Drive document as well as creating a blog post. Think of these as really short Cliffs Notes. Lots of examples here.

I only keep a book if I think there is chance I’ll read it again (I’ve read each of the John Sanford Prey novels half a dozen times). All others are donated to the local library for their annual book sale.

I couldn’t guess how much I’ve spent on books in the last fifty years. I’m sure Amazon has that number for the last 30 years, but I don’t regret a penny. Fiction is my virtual reality and non-fiction the better part of my education. With a book close at hand I am never bored.

Lots of my acquaintances prefer audio books and I’ll confess to some bias on this topic. Having someone read a book to me is not the same as reading the book. Might be a better experience for some but it’s not the same as hearing my mental voice tell the story. I love the smell of a book…the feel of the turning pages…the physical experience of reading.

Age of Social Media Ending

That’s the title of an article in The Atlantic back in 2022. It’s behind a paywall so I’ll share a few of my favorite excerpts (and a few thoughts). The piece is a year old so some of this might less (or more) relevant.

The reporter traces an evolution/devolution of “social networks” to “social media.”

Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.

Blogs (and bloglike services, such as Tumblr) [hosted] “musings” seen by few and engaged by fewer. In 2008, the Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink published a book about blogs and social networks whose title summarized their average reach: Zero Comments.

I was blogging long before social networks or media. And I read lots of blogs. I recall being…mystified?… by the idea of social media.

“social media,” a name so familiar that it has ceased to bear meaning. But two decades ago, that term didn’t exist. […] “…social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts. Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones).” […] The network, which had previously been used to establish and maintain relationships, becomes reinterpreted as a channel through which to broadcast.

As a one-time broadcaster (radio) I understand the appeal of reaching an audience.

Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.

I loved blogging. Still do. But damned few people ever read this blog. And I got even fewer comments. Disabled that feature years ago. “The rush of likes and shares felt so good because the age of zero comments felt so lonely.”

smays.com

I registered smays.com in 1997 (26 years ago!). I believe mays.com was owned by a gentleman in Seattle and on a trip in 2005 we met for a beer. At that time he was a 42 year old attorney. Married. Child free. He had a very successful radio career that started in Oklahoma City and wound up in San Francisco. After law school he He went to law school. He wasn’t using Mays.com at the time but I couldn’t talk him into selling. Still doesn’t seem to be in use.

As near as I can tell there are no 3 or 4 word .com domains. (Unless you buy one). Five-word .com domains appear to be less scarce.

Bring back personal blogging

This piece in The Verge (by Monique Judge) touches on many/most of the reasons I never stopped blogging.

In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs.

Social media wasn’t a thing that existed back then, so all our pontificating on various topics took place on our personal weblogs, and the discussions happened in the comments section of said blogs.

The biggest reason personal blogs need to make a comeback is a simple one: we should all be in control of our own platforms.

Personal stories on personal blogs are historical documents when you think about it. They are primary sources in the annals of history, and when people look back to see what happened during this time in our lives, do you want The New York Times or Washington Post telling your story, or do you want the story told in your own words?

do think of my blog as a history of sorts. What was I reading, watching, thinking since 2002? This is where you’ll find it (if anywhere).

We are now in an age where people come on the internet to be the worst possible versions of themselves, and it’s an ugly sight to behold.

Not here.

In the past 20 years I’ve encountered countless wanna-be bloggers that never really get around to posting consistently because they get sidetracked by “setting up” and futzing with their blog. Endlessly searching for the perfect tool; the perfect layout; the perfect hosting service. They’re like “photographers” who never get around to taking photos because they’re so busy setting up the dark room. The illustration below is perfect.

I knew him well

If a person were to read my ~6,000 blog posts, spanning 20 years, he/she would know me better than anyone who has ever met me. That person does not exist and I suspect never will.

Perhaps one day an AI (“I prefer the term ‘artificial person‘”) will read them and want to discuss what I wrote/shared.

I won’t be around but perhaps this future AP will be able to create a synthetic version of me, using everything I’ve shared (YouTube, etc) and we’ll have a nice chat.

Twenty years of blogging

Twenty years ago (February 2, 2002) I posted my first entry here at smays.com. 5,981 posts. About 25 posts a month, 299 posts a year. My original tag line was, “I really have to start writing some of this down.” I’d hear or read a memorable quote and wanted a place to put it where I could find it later. A place where I could add some context to a photo or video clip, although video was really hard to do in those days. Took forever to encode and even longer to upload. I made the clips tiny to keep the file size small. The media archive contains 2,982 images; 191 video clips (with lots of links to YouTube); and 86 audio files.

From the beginning I’ve been diligent about categories (30) and tags (228). Metadata. Only found half a dozen I missed, now fixed. A few of my categories: Books (438), Family/Friends (583), Gadgets/apps (492), Internet (796), Media/Entertainment (1,185), Politics/gov (552), Sci/Tech (613), Miscellany (689), Video (571). You can see the full list in the sidebar.

For me tags are the most important part of a blog spanning two decades. Can’t imagine finding anything without them. A few examples: Blogging (346), Consciousness (102), Dogs (152), Google (230), Music (209), Television (157). With almost 6,000 posts, you don’t know what to search for if you don’t know it’s there. Tagging addresses that.

Many people will highlight portions of text or make margin notes while reading a book. But how would you ever find that bit later? Flip thorough all the pages? And that require you remember the quote you’re looking for. When I finish a a book (usually this is with non-fiction) I transcribe anything I underlined, and turn that into a blog post. WordPress does such a good job indexing posts I can search for some obscure word or phrase –even if I don’t remember the title of the book– and I’ve got it.

When I was working with clients (15 years ago?), helping them set up a blog and make their first post, one of two things would happen: There would be a dozen posts within 24 hours (very rare); or they wouldn’t post again for weeks. They wanted to have a blog, just just didn’t want to write blog posts. I believe there is blogging gene. You have it or you don’t.

Another pitfall I’ve mostly avoided is the need to make every post a brilliant essay. They do this because they expect people to read their blog and they want every post to be a work of art. I knew from the beginning it was unlikely anyone would read my blog. Not with any regularity. This was liberating. If I found something interesting (to me) in the New York Times, for example, I could copy a couple of grafs and paste to my blog with a link back to the original NYT story and done.

Social media platforms have pretty much killed off blogs. Nobody expects much effort for those posts. (They even have a name for them: “shitposts“) And in ten minutes every post is washed away in the stream. And those LIKES make you think someone is reading what you posted.

I was hooked on blogging from the beginning and believed it was/would be an important part of the Internet. I was wrong about that but that’s okay. From time to time I think about what will become of smays.com when I’m gone. Is there any way to keep it live, just as an archive of course? Probably not. The WayBack Machine (Internet Archive) has some of it. And that’s good enough.

No comments

I’ve gone back and forth on comments since I started blogging in February 2002. When I remember I disable them but rarely get any comments on posts where I forget. We don’t get a lot of visitors here but that’s always been fine by me. One of my favorite bloggers, Dave Winer, has what I consider the best approach to comments.

Start a blog, I advise, and say what you have to say and link to my post. Of course what they really wanted was to use my flow to (very often) zing me personally in some way. I consider that spam. Or hijacking. It gets so insidious so quickly that I haven’t had comments here for any duration for many years. It starts off collegial, but quickly devolves into abuse as the trolls take over.

I’ve attempted to disable all comments from previous posts but haven’t checked to see if that worked.

Tags and Categories

A little history. I was keeping notes in a journal long before I got my first computer (1984). When I came across a good quote in a book or a line in a movie, I’d jot it down in a spiral bound notebook with the idea I could find it later. Only way to do that, however, was to page through all of the notebooks. When I got my first computer I tried making notes in a text file which was searchable but just barely.

In the late 90’s I used Microsoft FrontPage to create a “personal home page” where I parked some of this stuff. (My tagline was: “I’ve really got to start writing some of this down”) Hardly an improvement over my notebooks but I was naive enough to think someone might want to read what I wrote. I put the new stuff at the top of the page and pushed the older notes down.

As blogging software and platforms came along, I tried most of them. Radio Userland, Blogger, TypePad, Posterous and — eventually — WordPress. I don’t recall when I first encountered the concept of tagging my posts but it wasn’t until I started using WordPress that I got serious about metadata. Why I tag and how I tag in a moment, first let’s talk about categories. Continue reading

If you care about your thoughts, keep them

From an article by Derek Sivers on the benefits of a daily diary:

“Years from now you might be looking back, wondering if you were as happy or as sad as you remember during this time. […] We so often make big decisions in life based on predictions of how we think we’ll feel in the future, or what we’ll want. Your past self is your best indicator of how you actually felt in similar situations. So it helps to have an accurate picture of your past. […] You can’t trust distant memories. But you can trust your daily diary. It’s the best indicator to your future self (and maybe descendants) of what was really going on in your life at this time.”