Scott comments on the update frequency of blogs: daily, I run thru a list of links and when I suspect they won’t be updated, I just skip over them.
Like Scott, I also don’t like aggregators. I played with them for a while, but they just didn’t fit the way I like to read, and, yes, I like to read “in context”, so to speak – I like browsing outwards from people’s blogrolls etc when I have some spare time.
Ever since I changed my blogroll to show me the last time something was updated, it’s been amazing. I no longer waste time visiting blogs that haven’t updated, and I also get to see when the less frequently updated blogs have changed. For me it’s the perfect solution.
Unfortunately it relies of having server side scripting capabilities (see my earlier description of how I did it), which probably rules out most Radio users. But I expect to see it in Movable Type any day now …
We now know that electronic technology has no more to contribute to computing than the physical equipment. We now know that a programmable computer is no more and no less than an extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable mechanism without changing a single wire, and that the core challenge for computing science is a conceptual one, viz. what (abstract) mechanisms we can conceive without getting lost in the complexities of our own making.
But in the mean time, the harm was done: the topic became known as “computer science” – which, actually, is like referring to surgery as “knife science” – and it was firmly implanted in people’s minds that computing science is about machines and their equipment. Quod non.
(These days I cannot enter a doctor’s, dentist’s, or lawyer’s office without being asked my advice about their office computer. When I then tell them that I am totally uninformed as to what hard- and software products the market currently offers, their faces invariably get very puzzled.)
This was written in 1985, and I don’t think things have changed much! I still have to explain to people on a regular basis that I don’t actually know very much about computers per se, and probably can’t tell them what’s wrong with their printer/email/word processor/whatever.
