Some ideas to ponder
Gianna sent these to me this morning.
5 comments February 22nd, 2008
Posts filed under 'internet'
How, why and who? Bloggers want to know.
Questions to you:
How did you get here? If you are one of those I wrestled to the floor and held down until you promised to visit, you don’t really need to share that. How do you find other blogs?
Why do you return to blogs that you read? Why do you subscribe?
Who are you? Not what it says on your passport or license, but what kind of reader are you?
Answers from me:
How do I figure out what to write? Partly by what interests me, partly from what interests you, as demonstrated by search terms used that found me. Example below:
reheatable vegetables dishes 6
hog jowls 3
CORAL,GEM 2
Bernard Willhelm 2
getting old fable 1
Summer 2008 Style 1
pasta sauce with ham 1
Beef Ragu 1
tomatoes on the floor 1
preserving+methods+dried+pasta 1
That was yesterday. Other days, other terms. Some astounding.
Your comments.
Links out, although some are not to be understood. I’m wondering what the seeker after certain key words will think when he arrives here and sees Prosciutto as a topic.
Conversations in real life.
Why do I blog? Because I need someone to listen to me! OK, maybe that’s lame, but mostly because I need to write and to blog you must write.
Who do I read? The people on the right in the blogroll and links, as well as a bunch of things I have on Blog Lines that aren’t necessarily pertinent to this blog but add to my general fund of knowledge (and sometimes misinformation, too.)
6 comments January 4th, 2008
How much is enough? The information load.
Sometimes I feel inundated with facts, clues, offerings that pour in through my computer at plus or minus 50,000 bps.
Here, for example, is a really interesting look into international cuisine. The members are from absolutely everywhere, but most of the ideas are written in English of varying quality. It will not surprise you that some of the worst English comes from places where it is the mother tongue. Maybe familiarity does breed contempt. The quality is spotty, too. There are an enormous amount of semi-homemade and tinned soup ideas, none of which I even bother with. This morning there was a “Tuscan potpie” that I looked at just because I never heeard of any Tuscan eating potpie. Why is it Tuscan? It has canellini in it! Boh! But it’s made with canned biscuits which would confound any Tuscan I know.
Most of what is posted is derived from cookbooks, TV and blogs, but you might otherwise have missed it, so that doesn’t count that much. There are a number of professional chefs and caterers there, too. It’s all offered up free once you’ve registered. Maybe it’s Facebook for cooks. One interesting thing you can do is describe what’s in your kitchen, or describe what you feel like eating, i.e., spicy, sweet, hot; then the generator will serve you up a list of dishes that fit what you’ve got or what you want to taste. There’s even a page for Italian Speakers and their foods.
How can you keep up with the stream of that or any other changing content website? My answer is Bloglines. There are other agglomerators, but this was an early one and the one I use, although I turned down the new version because I couldn’t work it out in five minutes.
This is what I see, however. Bloglines will show 200 offerings per feed. Group Recipes will often go way over 200 in a single day. Even BBC World headlines can top 200. I choose to sift through and choose which ones to open in a new tab. When you newly subscribe to a feed it will show the latest 10 feeds. That feels a bit more manageable.
Then there are sales notifiers. Whoooo! And are they ever a sticky bunch. Miss the check off saying you don’t want email from them and you are their pal forever, with ads offering things you don’t want for prices that leave you breathless, and not in a good way, as long as there is life on Planet Earth.
It must be the 2007 version of those glossy catalogs that used to choke my mailbox in another country another time.
4 comments November 18th, 2007
