Saturday, January 03, 2004

(No) time to read

In the normal world when you want to read something, you decide what to read, buy the book (maybe even on Amazon), go to the library or second hand shop. And there you go sitting on your favorite couch and start to read. Whereas on the internet, we often don't have a clear view of what to read (at least, I don't have when I go online). We open up some blogs, find an interesting link, from which another interesting site is offered. And before you know it, you end up on the site of the Journal of Digital Information, article named 'Networked Knowledge Representation and Exchange using UML and RDF'. Note: not that there is something wrong with this site, there are probably a lot of librarians and information architects out there for which this site is quite meaningful. At that point I was thinking to myself what exactly it was I was reading. I find it intriguing to learn something from the field of Information Architecture, but it seems far too little related to my daily work to put too much time into it. For me, it's better to keep up with the more technical, programming related blogs (see link list on your left side for an indication of what I'm reading). Which actually brings me to what I wanted to say: so much can be read on, and learned from the sources on the internet, that you have to very carefully weigh the offered information to the time it takes to read. Then, it is even better to maybe just leave a site than to continue reading it and finding yourself out of time for what you really came to the internet for. In my case, that's making a decent blogging entry. I'm amazed at the amount of keyboard strikes some people are able to upload to the net. I really envy them for their ability to put so much effort into writing interesting blog entries. So, maybe this is a good new years resolution: to blog more in 2004. In fact, when this won't happen I guess this blog will end just like a lot of other ones, in shortage of content.


ps: I found this person who reflects in the same way. Only difference, he's in his forties, I;m in my thirties. But I already feel a big distance between the young twentiesome tweakers and me.