Readin' and writin'

A friend of mine made me realize yesterday that as hard as it is to keep up with reading all the blogs of interesting people I know, the real challenge is creating the content, writing the posts, for the blogs I own.

Honestly I much prefer to read other people's ideas than to write down my own. My own ruminations don't surprise me or cause me to think of things in a new light. Other people's ideas often make me pause and reconsider my own opinions.

I one of those people who think more than speak, and when I do speak, I try to say something thoughtful and considered. I value words and interpersonal communications. I dislike idle talk and babbling. Foolish though it may be, I tend to waste money and time more than words. In the past I've usually only posted something after I've thought about it a good deal and have a conclusion I can defend. As a result I tend to keep most of my random thoughts to myself.

Yet I realize that if I keep my own thoughts to myself my blogs will get really boring really fast.

Until Google sees fit to allow me to import my postings to Google+ into this blog, I'll make every effort to post a little something more often than has been my past practice. Some days it may read more like Twitter postings. I may only post seeds of ideas, stray thoughts that haven't fully been considered. Perhaps they'll serve as a means to a broader conversation.

Jeber's is dead, long live Jeber's

After many years of posting to my blog at jebers.com and evidently far too many updates to the WordPress framework, that site is totally broken. Years of posts have been lost, site functionality is completely borked (a technical term meaning damaged beyond repair) and I have run out of ideas as to how to restore it to its former self.

For now and possibly well into the future I'm redirecting jebers.com to this blog, one I've been using almost as long as the former jeber's site. It doesn't appear that I can import any of the posts to the other site into here, they're just gone.

I went through this with another blog not long ago, one that was pretty popular if my host's stats can be trusted. It was a traumatic loss at the time but I've gotten over it. No doubt I'll get over the loss of jebers.com as well.

I've also lost a lot of trust in the WordPress platform and my host, 1and1. Since Google owns Blogger I doubt I'll encounter the same problems here I'm experiencing on my 1and1 site. I may even move my tech blog over here. Why not. I've pretty much become a commodity of Google's anyway. It almost feels like I'm back in the 1990's and Google is AOL.

For a blog, content is king. When my content disappears I get irritated. If Google can offer the kind of stability others cannot, then I'll put my trust in them and divorce myself from WordPress and 1and1.

So let me welcome those of you who have bookmarked jebers.com and are wondering how you wound up on jackcarlson.net. I appreciate your interest and support. I welcome your comments and feedback.

Jebers.com may be down for the count, but Jeber will survive.

I'm still alive, I think

I've just been a bit distracted.

There's this new service called Google+ and since I joined up a couple of weeks ago I've managed to log out of it for several minutes at a time.

Realizing that real-time conversations beat the heck out of blog posting (then waiting sometimes forever for a comment or reaction), I've cut down dramatically on the number of blogs I maintain, from more than 8 to just four. Now when something comes up on a social network that I want to expand on I can blog about it in whichever blog is most appropriate. And since it's highly likely that Google will at some point incorporate Blogger into the Google+ family of related sites, this blog is the most obvious one in which to expound on topics first raised in Google+.

So this blog will cease being my "everything that interests me" blog. That honor is bestowed upon jebers.com, my primary personal blog. I also will begin keeping jebersblog.com updated more frequently with tech tips and discussions, especially about Macintosh, since my MacBook and iPad have become my primary computing devices. I'm keeping my jeberjabber.typepad blog for purely sentimental reasons. While not the first blog I started, it was the first blog I started (in 2004) that still exists.

Stick with me, folks. I think the year ahead is going to be one wild ride for social networking and the ever growing Google empire.