[Phoenix-pm] Fwd: phoenix.pm.org wants to aggregate your reddit, del.icio.us, twitter, LJ, myspace

[Andrew Johnson]

My thoughts, spurred by the thoughts of others:

On 8/2/07, Scott Walters <scott at illogics.org> wrote:
> On  0, Michael Friedman <friedman at highwire.stanford.edu> wrote:
> > Perhaps the lack of response is because most of us don't have blogs?
>
> That's absurd.  I read on a blog somewhere that 80% of people have
> blogs.  Maybe it was a poll someone put on their LiveJournal page.
> I don't remember.
>
> Yeah, I started to come to that terrible realization myself after I
> spent hours Googling for "phoenix perl blog" and not turning up
> anything I didn't already have (I knew about Andrew's, Ben's,
> and Brock's).

Yes, and checking my blog you'll see that since YAPC::NA 2006, there's
a dearth of Perl related content there, which why I hesitated to send
an RSS feedlink.  I'll sometimes link to Perl related articles in my
"Most Recent Links" section (powered by del.icio.us!), but I rarely
comment on Perl stuff anymore.

> But still, I'm amazed at that.  I honestly thought everyone used
> reddit or del.icio.us or *something*.  Even LiveJournal.  I hear
> so many debates about which blog site to use, the debates hinging
> on the crowds on them, among other things.  My non-geeky friends
> have MySpace or LiveJournal blogs...
>
> > I know that I don't. The interesting stuff I work on is either not
> > technically interesting (yet another class tied to a db table) or is
> > company proprietary. Not to mention that I don't have time to keep up
> > a simple home page, let alone write a blog with any regularity.
>

Ditto and ditto.  Most of my friends have MySpace or LiveJournal
accounts, but hey, I'm a web developer, I need my own site.  But yeah,
most of my programming stuff lately has been $DayJob related.  Most of
my personal stuff lately has been photography-related, and I don't
think people want to hear about how SuperAwesome (TM) Google's Picasa,
Adobe Lightroom, and Flickr Uploadr are.

> It usually doesn't work that.  Okay, I push the line a bit with
> talking about work stuff that could be considered slightly sensitive
> (but certainly not trade secret), but most people just have
> vacation photos, little observations about their life, random bits
> of creativity, funny pictures and links for thier friends.  I don't
> find much time to post pictures (though the Nokia N800 makes it
> really easy -- snap a picture, then upload it right to flickr, or
> shoot a video, and upload it right to youtube care of Opera) but
> I somehow magically find time to rant.
>
> By the way, the N800 is *way* cooler than the iPhone.  The
> "ten reasons the N800 is better than the iPhone" didn't even
> scratch the surface.  The iPhone doesn't have P2P apps you
> can install with which to get fetch music to play ;)
>

I, too, have recently discovered the geeky coolness that is the N800.
Since there's a fairly complete Debian-based Linux distro underneath,
there's considerable opportunity for direct software ports, though the
coolest apps are definitely the ones that were written from scratch
for the N800 or have been otherwise Hildon-ized.  Flickr does work
quite well, though most of Google's web apps are a bit slow, which I'm
not sure the new Mozilla-based browser will fix (what's needed is an
ultra-quick JavaScript engine, I think).

Oh yeah, and although no one seems to be mentioning it, there IS a
Perl interpreter onboard, version 5.8.3.

> Working in an office recently, we had a collective feed somewhat
> like this (originally done with Yahoo! Pipes then moved to
> del.icio.us care of a tag) and nearly everyone I worked with
> submitted links to essays on programming, project management,
> emerging technologies, neat hacks, cool modules, things other
> programming language communities are doing, etc, etc.  There
> was no ranting or blogging, just a lot of linking.  So I got the
> impression from that that most programmers had a social bookmark
> of programming stuff.  Twitter is supposed to be huge.  I figured
> we'd have a few other people who use it (Ben has a blog *and*
> a Twitter account and probably other things).
>
> Hell, I've probably got a dozen RSS feeds... my sticky notes at
> ponderer.org/webnotes, Twitter, Flickr (disused), YouTube,
> LiveJournal (disused), an RSS feed of messages I've tagged
> in mutt, an RSS feed from a calendaring app I use, feed
> from the blog thingie I hacked up really quick with Continuity
> at slowass.net:1111, my use.perl.org blog, ...  okay, that's
> nine, but I'm probably forgetting a few.  So to have them
> coming out my ears while other people apparently have none
> is mystifying.

Everything that people need to know about me I put on my site (that's
http://www.transformedplanet.com, for those that don't know).
Although I use several of the things you mention, if I can't integrate
it with my site somehow, I don't use it.  So my site aggregates
selected del.icio.us links, Flickr photos, some Amazon stuff, and my
(sorely in need of updating) ITToolbox blog.

Oh, and Twitter?  It's cool tech, but nobody needs to know what I'm
doing minute by minute.

In truth, though I do Perl stuff everyday, Perl is being left behind
in a couple of critical areas I'm interested in.  Ruby on Rails is the
cutting edge web development framework now, and the mobile scripting
language of choice for non-iPhones is Python.  I'm sure Perl will
always be around as a part of Unix, and will continue to be a valuable
database access and "back-end" style language; I don't think it's
dying per se.  But people aren't interested in it anymore.  I used to
think people were waiting for Parrot and Perl 6, but now I think they
got tired of waiting and found other tools to do their work.
Increasingly, I'm thinking I'm going to have to do the same thing.

[aj]