From Attention to Bookmarking to Blogging

As I am redefining my various blogs and add more structure to them, I needed to analyse my Internet consumption. My attention follows 4 stages: scanning, reading, thinking and commenting. Each stage has it’s own rules, blogs and formats. I will explain.

• Scanning - in the first stage I am scanning various Items, that might interest me. I just look at the headlines or read the item diagonally. I subscribed to multiple feeds and when an item seems interesting I flag it, so that I can read it later. Only a few items I read right away. I also have a small list of web-sites that I visit daily. Basically this stage is about containers (feeds and web-sites). Only the feeds are published as a blogroll. I do not publish my daily web-sites yet;
• Reading - the next stage is the vertical reading of blog-items that I flagged or web-pages that I clicked to. This is where my attention really starts. I do not keep track of what I do at this stage. Although the history file of my browser is an indication. After reading I usually un-flag an item or move to the next stage;
• Thinking - in this stage I usually re-read a piece, because it is interesting and I want to think about it. These are the items that are worthwhile to save. These can also be items that I download (software, recipe) for storing or testing. These items are designated by permalink (url), a title, a summary and a some tags, i.e. the standard bookmark. Bookmarking them gives also an appreciation signal to the original author. Basically bookmarks are independent of the MicroContent type. They can refer to a blog-item, a recipe, an application, etc. I intend to publish these bookmarks in a special BookMark-blog. This allows them to be repurposed by third parties. I might upload some to a book-mark service such as del.icio.us;
• Commenting - In the final stage I really want to internalise the Item. A recipe will wind up in my recipe MicroContent client. An Application might be stored in my Applications folder and will be commented on in my software blog. And a blog-item will turn up with personal comments in one of my blogs. The comments should include a link to the original source, where I got the inspiration. And it might include a link to the item (service, web-page, product) that was talked about. This implies that a blog-item for me consists of the fields: title, description, inspiration_link, product_link and tags. And that is how I will set up my new blog: my own MicroContent blog-type. The added advantage is that I can publish my blog as a bookmark-file (using xfolk) as well;

Categories/tags: general
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