Comments on: Going Jurassic Park on a 40,000 year old cave bear http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20050604/1969/ Technology, music, video, art, news, reviews and muse on the web Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:31:11 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.2 By: Make You Go Hmm: » RSS Sunday subscription cleanup http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20050604/1969/#comment-20975 Make You Go Hmm: » RSS Sunday subscription cleanup Sun, 18 Sep 2005 15:29:29 +0000 http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20050604/1969/#comment-20975 [...] - I’m not that interested in animals, unless they are 40,000 year old dead animals like this cave bear story. - Kids and family and What Did I Do stuff might be interesting to some bloggers, but it’s not usually that interesting to me unless whatever you did was something innovative and/or new. A high concentration of blog entries about that kind of stuff and I’ll usually skim or skip those type blogs altogether. I do like to read this stuff once in awhile from my favorite bloggers, just to be reminded that they are in fact human beings, so it’s not that I’m totally down on these type posts, but unless you are a famous person, I probably won’t like a high concentration of that. I unsubbed the dooce blog because that’s all she does, that’s the point of her blog, and even though her writing is often very good, it bored me (sorry Heather). The exception to the What Did I Do criteria is something programming or technology-related. Now there is something I like to read about and will probably be compelled to write about somewhere, maybe even here. I have a daily updated blog like this myself (on PHP scripting). A blog where I can learn something new every day is definitely of interest to me. - lack of original material and reblogs. I want to read primarily original material, not material recycled or copy/pasted from other sources. If the blog isn’t at least 90% original material, I likely won’t subscribe. This doesn’t mean the blogger can’t include news sources or give their opinion on some piece of technology-related news, after all that’s the focus of blogging, but if the copy/pasted text is more often than not longer than their words, then it’s probably not for me. Remember, most times we can subscribe directly to the content that is copy/pasted, so why should we come to your blog to read one sentence or quip besides a gigantic amount of copy/pasted text? I’m guilty of doing this once in awhile and it’s a bad, lazy habit to get into for bloggers. Readers notice. At least I do. - writing without wit or passion. Scoble mentioned this one once before and I’m with him 100%. Have some freaking passion! Care about the material or don’t blog it. If you don’t have much to say then either put it on a linkblog, keep it in draft mode until you do have something to say with more depth or don’t blog it at all. I have over 20 posts in draft mode for this blog right now in various stages. This post has been in the draft mode for months, in fact, before I finally spruced it up today and kicked it out. - catchy, relevant headlines. I know that many folks read through RSS, but I typically just read headlines and snippets in my aggregator, not the full text. This is why I don’t get all up in arms when publishers use full text or partial text; I’ll subscribe to either if the headlines are well done and accurately describe the content. It’s sort of like eBay item titles: authors get 50 characters or so to tell me why I should read their blog entry. If the headlines are boring or nondescript, I’ll either unsubscribe or never subscribe. While on this subject, it’s important to note that as a reader I do not like being deceived. If you use some clever hook to suck me into your blog and then don’t deliver I’ll feel cheated. Do that too many times and to the unsubscribe shed the blog will go. - size and frequency does matter. Unlike popular opinion out there which suggests that blog entries should be shorter and more in number, I look for higher quality (yes, even longer) and fewer in number. Just please if it’s long break up your paragraphs. There is little worse than looking at and trying to read a long, long paragraph (like this one, ironically). I like Slashdot, Boing Boing, Metafilter, etc but they wear me out with too many stories. If you are going to have a lot of content then please find some way to organize it so that I can filter through it for what I’m specifically looking for (see next item). - don’t forget the bells and whistles. The occasional podcast, vblog (video blog), screencaps, etc. Here at this blog readers can subscribe to any category or even a set of keywords. This is the type of filtering I look for with blogs that are very frequently updated. Perhaps with more than a dozen entries a day. The reason I say a dozen is that’s about what fits in my sidebar with headlines on a single non-scrolling screen. Any more than a dozen and it requires scrolling, which I’m not going to do very often. [...] […] - I’m not that interested in animals, unless they are 40,000 year old dead animals like this cave bear story. - Kids and family and What Did I Do stuff might be interesting to some bloggers, but it’s not usually that interesting to me unless whatever you did was something innovative and/or new. A high concentration of blog entries about that kind of stuff and I’ll usually skim or skip those type blogs altogether. I do like to read this stuff once in awhile from my favorite bloggers, just to be reminded that they are in fact human beings, so it’s not that I’m totally down on these type posts, but unless you are a famous person, I probably won’t like a high concentration of that. I unsubbed the dooce blog because that’s all she does, that’s the point of her blog, and even though her writing is often very good, it bored me (sorry Heather). The exception to the What Did I Do criteria is something programming or technology-related. Now there is something I like to read about and will probably be compelled to write about somewhere, maybe even here. I have a daily updated blog like this myself (on PHP scripting). A blog where I can learn something new every day is definitely of interest to me. - lack of original material and reblogs. I want to read primarily original material, not material recycled or copy/pasted from other sources. If the blog isn’t at least 90% original material, I likely won’t subscribe. This doesn’t mean the blogger can’t include news sources or give their opinion on some piece of technology-related news, after all that’s the focus of blogging, but if the copy/pasted text is more often than not longer than their words, then it’s probably not for me. Remember, most times we can subscribe directly to the content that is copy/pasted, so why should we come to your blog to read one sentence or quip besides a gigantic amount of copy/pasted text? I’m guilty of doing this once in awhile and it’s a bad, lazy habit to get into for bloggers. Readers notice. At least I do. - writing without wit or passion. Scoble mentioned this one once before and I’m with him 100%. Have some freaking passion! Care about the material or don’t blog it. If you don’t have much to say then either put it on a linkblog, keep it in draft mode until you do have something to say with more depth or don’t blog it at all. I have over 20 posts in draft mode for this blog right now in various stages. This post has been in the draft mode for months, in fact, before I finally spruced it up today and kicked it out. - catchy, relevant headlines. I know that many folks read through RSS, but I typically just read headlines and snippets in my aggregator, not the full text. This is why I don’t get all up in arms when publishers use full text or partial text; I’ll subscribe to either if the headlines are well done and accurately describe the content. It’s sort of like eBay item titles: authors get 50 characters or so to tell me why I should read their blog entry. If the headlines are boring or nondescript, I’ll either unsubscribe or never subscribe. While on this subject, it’s important to note that as a reader I do not like being deceived. If you use some clever hook to suck me into your blog and then don’t deliver I’ll feel cheated. Do that too many times and to the unsubscribe shed the blog will go. - size and frequency does matter. Unlike popular opinion out there which suggests that blog entries should be shorter and more in number, I look for higher quality (yes, even longer) and fewer in number. Just please if it’s long break up your paragraphs. There is little worse than looking at and trying to read a long, long paragraph (like this one, ironically). I like Slashdot, Boing Boing, Metafilter, etc but they wear me out with too many stories. If you are going to have a lot of content then please find some way to organize it so that I can filter through it for what I’m specifically looking for (see next item). - don’t forget the bells and whistles. The occasional podcast, vblog (video blog), screencaps, etc. Here at this blog readers can subscribe to any category or even a set of keywords. This is the type of filtering I look for with blogs that are very frequently updated. Perhaps with more than a dozen entries a day. The reason I say a dozen is that’s about what fits in my sidebar with headlines on a single non-scrolling screen. Any more than a dozen and it requires scrolling, which I’m not going to do very often. […]

]]> By: John’s Blog Thoughts » Blog Archive » Dinosaur fossil bones give interesting finds! http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20050604/1969/#comment-14693 John’s Blog Thoughts » Blog Archive » Dinosaur fossil bones give interesting finds! Tue, 16 Aug 2005 03:58:36 +0000 http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20050604/1969/#comment-14693 [...] I also found another blogger, by Tdavid, mentioning a find from a 40,000 year old cave bear. Ok, well, not quite Jurassic Park yet, but impressively scientists have made progress in connecting the DNA sequence of a cave bear that died 40,000 years ago. [...] […] I also found another blogger, by Tdavid, mentioning a find from a 40,000 year old cave bear. Ok, well, not quite Jurassic Park yet, but impressively scientists have made progress in connecting the DNA sequence of a cave bear that died 40,000 years ago. […]

]]> By: John's Thoughts http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20050604/1969/#comment-7349 John's Thoughts Mon, 06 Jun 2005 02:49:10 +0000 http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20050604/1969/#comment-7349 <strong>Dinosaur fossil bones give interesting finds!</strong> I found an article which was very interesting to me. It was about a fossil with tissue in a dinosaur bones. Dinosaur fossil bones give interesting finds!

I found an article which was very interesting to me. It was about a fossil with tissue in a dinosaur bones.

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