lazy habits of blogging

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

i'd like to make an example of one of my heros. Guy Kawasaki. dude started a blog about two or three years ago and it was incredible. over just a few weeks, he exploded to the top of the blogosphere. here was a fifty plus year old guy who had been there done that, had been in the bowels of apple, and had his head screwed on strait with the way the world works today. he was just blowing everyone away with the kinds of thoughts he was offering up, for free no less, on a daily basis.

at some point within the last year, he changed the nature of the content he was delivering. instead of creating new / fresh / original content... he started linking / pointing / referring to content around him.

he switched from being a fresh water well, to being a portal, a gatekeeper, (dam?) of other peoples water.

he got lazy if you ask me.

now i've noticed these two kinds of blogs before (the portal and the well)... but never paid too much attention to the differences. it took watching guy kawasaki change from one to the other, for me to put a name on it, and clarify in my own mind there is a difference. and to also decide, i want to be a well. if only to challenge myself.

i can't vouch for quality of the water though ;-)

so with this in mind - and with an already too crowded blog page - ive created two new pages. the first is an about page - which is basically my internet credentials (like if you can't perform a google search on me), and is usually pretty static. it has some resources about what works for me (books, blogs, software) - if anyone's interested. the other is a tags page - which is very dynamic in that it shows a tag cloud of my delicious tags, my twenty five most recent delicious tags (left) as well as my most recent twenty five top or most important tags (right). you can get a feed to any of this stuff if you want.

i may someday bring this content back to my blog page, if i can organize it cleanly enough. but for now, this process has helped me separate the idea of being a fresh water well - from that of being a portal. and reinforced that i don't want to get lazy and let other people do too much of my thinking for me - let alone try to pass that off as my own content. not that i think i exist in a vacuum - those links are important context... it's stuff i'm reading. but it's not me.

ok in truth - no ones coming to my blog and tons of people are going to guy's - so i'll shut up now.