> Ultimately blogging and vlogging has rested on obscurity to do this. > For example... to pick on Andy Carvin... if the pictures in his photo > feed or blog feed were of cats and babies I figured pretty much they > werent' for me... and skipped right over them... but if they were of > vloggers and web luminaries i jumped right in and watched or read > them. The point is the demands of my time ensured that I skipped over > things weren't meant for me. Of course such security through > obscurity while great for the vast majority of very low level > communications is will not even slow down a trol or worse from digging > through your history. >
Perhaps I should have thrown in a video of one of my cats in between the videos of Zadi and Jarvis this week just to mess with you. :-) I've definitely struggled with this, since my blog is a delicate balance of personal stuff and professional stuff, which admittedly has swung a bit more personal since we had the baby eight months ago. (My wife and I are getting ready to launch a vlog about parenting, which will help take some of the pressure off - stay tuned.) Ideally, I'd love it if my blog software (movable type) or my site's search engine (Google Co-op) would allow the public to set up customized rss feeds based on keywords, just as you would with Google News or Technorati. That way, if you wanted to subscribe to a feed of my blog that only picks up content for keywords like "social media" and "video" and "public radio" (or "babies" and "cats" if that floats your boat), you could do that without any fuss. Perhaps even better would be personalized feeds with exclusionary preferences, such as a feed that captures everything on my blog _except_ keyword references of my own selection, like cats and babies, if that stuff gets on your nerves. Like David Weinberger suggested at NPR on Friday, it's all about the metadata. (Perhaps I should print some bumper stickers that say "It's the Metadata, Stupid.") If we just had better tools for seeking out or excluding certain types of metadata, we could personalize the user's experience and address some of these issues. That would leave us plenty of time obsessing over whether it's better to have 10 or 10,000 subscribers to our feeds. andy carvin www.andycarvin.com
