Spaced Out ::

This post marks the 1000th entry for the Spaced-OoooO-Out blog. My first post was on 12 September 2005 outlining a talk I gave at the Society of Cartographers annual meeting in Cambridge on the Journal of Maps. I then went on to outline the current debates between open data and the walled garden of the Ordnance Survey - speaking at the conference were (then CTO at OS) Ed Parsons and (then OpenGeodata) Jo Walsh. O have times have changed with Ed jumping to Google and OS opening up much of their data (and continuing to do so).

I never intended to spend 10 years blogging and much less write 1000 blog posts. That’s averaged out at 100 per year or about 2 a week. I’m not the most prolific poster but it has been consistent in terms of delivery, style and content…. very much focused on my teaching and research in GIS, remote sensing and geomorphology, with heavy smatterings of general IT around this.

Blogs have been around in various guises since people could leave public readable messages on the internet, however the evolution from regularly updated static web pages to bespoke server platforms designed for blogging didn’t really happen until the late 1990s when popularity started to spread. By 2004/5 blogging had hit the mainstream along with the rise in a web 2.0 technologies of which this was definitely a part.

So why blog? Well from a personal perspective I was a relatively new lecturer at Kingston University at the time, blogging was very much an area of “buzz” and I wanted to increase some profile. However there is more to it… I really like the comments Donald Clark made about the (lack of) use of blogging in education. Culled from both his list, as well as further thoughts of my own, these in particular struck a chord with me when I started:

(1) Get Better at Writing: to improve at writing you need to practise and what better way than to do something practical and useful. Blogging has helped me improve the quality of my writing which has fed directly back in to my academic work.

(2) Organising Thoughts: any kind of writing forces you to organise your thoughts in to meaningful content.

(3) Improve Understanding: writing strongly reinforces my understanding by forcing me to (re)think about topics.

(4) Sharing: opportunity to share useful (and not so useful!) information with readers.

(5) Debate: whilst I dont get too many comments, it allows at least a 1-way, and sometimes 2-way, conversation to develop.

(6) Notes to Self: my blog is an invaluable self-published repository of information. There are some things which small snippets, but just so darn useful. Where do I store such information? Well I could put it in to my GtD archive or blog it, share it and make it easy to find in the future!

(7) Indexed: what I write about is crawled and indexed by search engines and much of it can easily be found. For example, I find it amazing that my blog entry on the NERC FSF is on the first page of Google hits for it!

(8) READING blogs saves time: OK, this isn’t about writing, but reading, however I follow 57 blogs at the moment using the The Old Reader (and GReader on Android) as my feed aggregator of choice. It’s an invaluable time saver for keeping up with important snippets of information.

Whilst I am a BIG fan of blogging, micro-blogging (aka Twitter) is just not for me for two reasons:

(1) Vast amounts of drivel: I am NOT interested in the minutiae of a persons day. I want “signal” above “noise” in life and you drown in noise on Twitter, There is undoubtedly signal but finding it can be difficult.

(2) Time: it is considerably more time consuming to stay on top of the constant drip of information…. don’t get me started about Facebook!

As a footnote to that… Twitter has its place and I do use it occasionally. Very occasionally….

Finally a technical note - I have always used the uber-cool Blosxom blogging engine which runs as a CGI script from my own server with all posts stored as text files. Its ultra reliable and portable, which is often not the case for more complex database driven sites.