Soylent Red

The phrase "web log" has been around for 10 years according to the BBC, who marked it's 10^th anniversary on December 17. I think it's about time we came up for new word for what we do here. "Clogging the tubes" has the right feel. So to speak.

Terrifyingly, Soylent Red is coming up on its 5^th birthday in less than a month. I've posted on average a little over once every three days throughout that time.

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A quote from Merlin Mann:

It seems like people start out with the idea that they are going to make stuff for the Internet and then they kind of figure out what the content is gonna be. This is not dissimilar from what I’m doing.

How true is this of almost any of us on the Web? We've pushed ourselves up onto the stage and now we're standing about wondering what it was we were so desperate to talk about.

The quote comes from The Merlin Show, episode 19.

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You either have something to say or the time in which to say it, but rarely both.

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Is anyone using Jaiku? I signed up a day or two ago and so far it seems a lot more useful than Twitter. Jaiku has a similar idea to Twitter—to post brief (140 character) snippets about what you're up to so that people can keep up with what you're doing without you having to compose a full blog post. People can subscribe to your updates so that they're sent notifications when you post something new.

Like Twitter, you can post to Jaiku by SMS or from the Web. There doesn't seem to be an instant messenger option yet (though Twitter's IM is down most of the time anyway) and I don't see a way to receive updates by phone, which is definitely something they'll want to work on.

The big advantage of Jaiku though is that it will pull in feeds from elsewhere to keep all of your updates in one place. I have it pulling in my Soylent Red feed, my Flickr photos, my Last.fm music information, my del.icio.us bookmarks and even my Twitter feed.

Jaiku doesn't pull the full content from all of these feeds. It shows just enough for you to know that there's new information from one of those sources.

If you're interested, here's my Jaiku.

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