Sundays are usually “put your hands up time” where I come from. In other words, a time to fess up to your faults. #

So here goes. I have an addiction. A serious addiction. It causes me no end of problems and sweaty-palmed angst. I am addicted to …

Techmeme! #

Like many a tech-oriented internet user, I find Gabe Rivera’s almost-perfect creation irresistible. There are times when it seems to be the centre of the universe, with huge galaxies and bright stars spinning off in vast numbers from this fiery firmament of knowledge and innovation. Heck, Syntagma is quite often in there too.

Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit to get your attention. Because there are also times — increasingly so — when a blanket of gloom settles over me as I trundle through the familiar stories on shiny new applications and hardware which deliver to the user the tiniest smidgeon of improvement over their current expensively-procured setup. And the orgasmic excitement over the tweeniest fall from grace, or the most overblown prediction, has to be experienced to be believed.

I was glad, therefore, to wake up this Sunday morning to a cool blast of common sense by Dave Winer. Spinning off a New York Times article about Silicon Valley, he pens the following :

“The truth is that the people of Silicon Valley toil to find security in money, never getting there, while avoiding the pleasures of life, including the mythological creativity, spinning on a treadmill, doing nothing but striving to make money, but it’s never enough. … You can’t find security through money, because security is impossible. We die. Deal with it.”

The reason that hit home to me is that it’s what I’ve been doing all this year. Pulling back from the mesmeric allure of the “blog network industry” dream which promises that the creation of mediocre content online can produce an eight-figure fortune in a couple of years or so.

I’ve written about my disillusionment on that score many times here, and also on the alternative of simply running a relaxed, quality content business for fun and a decent, regular income. In turn, this creates time to operate in the real world as a hedge play and a grounding exercise.

Either way, Silicon Valley is for obsessives who continue to believe the Faustian deal with venture capital is the path to enduring happiness.

To paraphrase that old IRA man, Gerry Adams : Mephistopheles hasn’t gone away, you know.

Lots of conversation around the place about Dave Winer’s post (now two) on “why Feedburner’s in trouble” — Feedburner is a service that manages your feeds in various innovative ways, but not before it swallows your URL into its own.

At first glance it seems that everybody is now using FB. We at Syntagma are not, although I did adopt it for six months a couple of years ago. What put me off was the thought that if China, say, barred the Feedburner domain, as they’re apt to do, you would be blocked too, along with millions (?) of other sites. The words “eggs” and “basket” spring unbidden to the mind.

The stats provision was great, mind you, and they also handle advertising in the feeds. It’s become a pretty comprehensive service, which I believe is still free for most users.

So, why don’t we just bite the bullet and sign up with FB? First, a little philosophy.

As far as software goes, I’m not one of those chaps who’s constantly on the lookout for small incremental improvements in performance from shiny new apps. I use Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer because almost everything else in the business environment is compatible. They are about as universal as it gets offline and on and allow me to relax about most things while getting on with the toil of earning a living.

So why not Feedburner?

One, it’s so ruddy intricate and adds yet another raft of complexity and layers of choice to an already over-engineered online world. I recoil from its sheer brilliance. If it paid me $10,000 a month, I probably would consider it — it would be worth the hassle. But I know it won’t, so I don’t.

Dave’s point that new owner, Google (no less), may tie the product to its Google Reader and other apps, is another point of contention. Lazily, I’m still on Bloglines, although I do have Reader set up — it’s rarely used for the same reason I don’t use Newsgator any more. Bloglines fulfils my simple needs and, by and large, performs well. Why chop and change for the sake of it?

So now someone at Google “owns” Feedburner and all their feeds. And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone.

We should always remember that the people who come to the internet to spend money and swot up on a topic are not geeks and students at Stanford. They are ordinary folk who don’t want all that complexity, but a simple user interface that intuitively guides them seamlessly to what they want.

That’s what “the next billion users” need. Let’s not forget them.

It’s never pleasant deleting or permanently archiving poorly-performing sites that have become a drain on a network, but it has to be done. Apart from good housekeeping, they affect the bottom line and reduce the profitability contributed by other hard-working sites.

I’ve been pruning and paring for a while now, but the next couple of weeks will see a final push towards a more balanced network.

To begin the process, I’ve started with my own personal blog, which has been up for all of a week. Why? I’ve never been much of a blogger. I like to write about ideas, phenomena, events and things. I never like to write about myself, so I’m not much use as a blogger.

Blogging, in its native sense of web log, is writing about yourself. Any other form of writing, even on blog platforms, is really reportage and commentary. To me, blogs are introspective and usually egotistical. Twitter is full of bloggers who imagine there’s an audience for their “tweets” : I’m going to the coffee shop … I’m having a latte … I’m sending an email to Fred … etcetera. There are even feeds for this stuff. Birdseed for birdbrains.

Why do they do it? Dunno, but it must be cathartic to imagine there’s an audience hanging on your every move. It’s the everyday equivalent of the celebrity who won’t leave the house without a film crew in tow.

It’s the same with blog posts. When I moved Syntagma to its present domain, I read through 500 or so old posts intending to bring them over. In the end I transferred 50 or so. The rest simply didn’t stand the test of time. They were either hopelessly wrong, or just plain batty.

Blog posts are essentially conversations — one-way most of the time. If you were able to replay your recent voice conversations with other people, would you actually want to?

So when I read an article by Dave Winer yesterday on the BBC website, I was surprised that he’s prepared to pay a largish sum of money to Google or Amazon to host his online bloggings “in perpetuity”. He even suggests they might be beamed into space so they’ll last forever.

Interesting that he chooses Google or Amazon. Google is less than a decade old, and Amazon can’t have been more than 15 years in the online retail business. Can you imagine either of them being around in 50 years, let alone 50 centuries.

Ancient Alexandria was the intellectual and spiritual centre of the planet. The Great Library of Alexandria was a wonder, preserving the knowledge and science of the ancient world. To have your work on a scroll or codex in that place would ensure it lasted forever.

Then a bunch of fundamentalist Christians came along and burnt it to the ground. After that “success” they did it again later, with the works of the Gnostics, which were only rediscovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt where they were hidden underground in pots. The pots proved more durable than all of man’s artifice in protecting ancient knowledge.

Why would Google or Amazon fare any better than the Great Library of Alexandria? They won’t, for course. Nothing lasts forever.

I would suggest Dave carefully sifts through his online archives, choosing only the bits that are still interesting today, and have them printed into durable books on quality paper and in robust bindings. He should then donate copies to libraries around the world, like the British Library, the Library of Congress, Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, etcetera. He would then have a better chance of his work seeing out the next 500 years than relying on Google and Amazon.

He should also bury a few copies in earthenware pots, in Death Valley, California, the Negev and Sahara deserts. Somewhere hot and dry, or they’ll rot over time. Climate change is the big imponderable here, of course.

On balance, I think he should just delete them, as I’ve done with my personal blog. Then, like Shakespeare and Homer, his work may be preserved in living memory by public demand, not by hosted servers paid ahead until the end of time.

Chronicles of wasted time … in praise of ladies dead and knights sublime. After Shakespeare