Lazyblogging

I find myself having a hard time coming up with the energy to write full blog posts lately. Take this story about Time Warner offering DVR boxes for free that don't have a fast forward feature in them so you can't skip ads. I was going to write an entry about how corporations try to spin copy protection as a feature, and tie it to this piece commenting on this piece about how Universal Music isn't offering its DRM-free music files over iTunes. I would then tie that to a comment by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing about how music companies really want to be able to sell you different versions of the same song, like how Microsoft has different versions of Windows Vista. You'd "get" to choose whether your album plays in just one stereo, or also on your car (for an added fee), or also on your iPod (for an added fee), and so on. They try to spin the idea by saying that people with only one stereo will appreciate being able to pay less than people who need the rights to play the album on multiple stereos, but of course no consumer really thinks like this. Referencing the Time Warner article, Jeffrey McManus says, "Has any customer in the history of DVR technology ever stepped up and said 'you know, this DVR thing is terrific, but what I’d really prefer is to lose the ability to skip commercials so that I can satisfy the needs of businesses in every stage of the value chain?'" (via).

So anyway, I was going to write this whole article about that (which I sort of have in the process of writing this), but then I got lazy and just linked to the original story with del.icio.us and added a few comments. The internet can breed laziness this way. Why write an article and expend actual effort and thought when I can just link and add a few comments? If you read my weblog, you might already know my position on the matter, and reading my comments might be redundant. Indeed, if you read my weblog, you probably also read Boing Boing and a few other like it, so you've probably already read people talking about the same thing more eloquently than I. Sure, if I put forth the effort to research what I was talking about, you'd get some value from reading what I write, but if I'm just going to regurgitate what other people have already written, why bother? If a sentence or so will do, a link is good enough, and you can make the connections yourself if you feel like following the link.

My post frequency has dropped considerably over the years, but I'm not sure the quality has. I'll frequently start a post, realize that a few sentences attached to a link are good enough, and just go with that instead. I am fairly proud of the assortment of links I throw on del.icio.us. I sort of prefer the idea that in running a blog you're as much an editor as an author, and mostly my blogging time is spent coming across articles and deciding which things to link to rather than coming up with new ideas to write about. I think you get as good of an idea of what I'm interested in by what I link to as you would if I wrote long posts less frequently. (Aside from the rare, more personal stuff, which I put up only for Vox friends.)

Movable Type 4 looks attractive, and over the weekend I spent some time trying to decide if I wanted to move from blogging on Vox to running MT again. The "pro" side has lots of bullet points, chiefly flexibility and having everything under my control, while on the "con" side are just two things: not having to manage a web host, and having to pay someone for hosting. Vox is free, offers only a few set customization options, and doesn't let me map my domain to it. But, it lets me restrict posts to just my friends, which is a huge win. Kwc and I exchanged some emails recently about how many free services there are now which do stuff you used to have to configure yourself on a web server you pay for. Having everything on your own server is great, and knowing that you own it is important, but for the moment, I don't mind separating stuff between Vox, del.icio.us, and Flickr and hoping that Six Apart and Yahoo! are trustworthy enough.

Counting from when I started using LiveJournal, I've been writing online for about five years now. Thanks for sticking around, even if I'm too lazy to write full posts most of the time. You probably had lots of other stuff to read, anyway.