I’ve occasionally dipped into Cory Doctorow’s publishing ouerve but never drank from his internet posting firehose. Apparently he left Boing Boing a bit ago and started his own link blogging site Pluralistic. As you would expect of Doctorow, it’s a flood of interesting content, leftish, activist, cryptopunk oriented, no surveillance capitalism to be seen.
Part of his 20 Years Blogging post is a detailed description of an linkblogger’s daily creative processs. In no way could I ever emulate that, but I was struck by a comment on his vast trove of previously published content:
My composition is greatly aided both 20 years’ worth of mnemonic slurry of semi-remembered posts and the ability to search memex.craphound.com (the site where I’ve mirrored all my Boing Boing posts) easily.
A huge, searchable database of decades of thoughts really simplifies the process of synthesis.
So for me throwing as much stuff as possible you’ve read, written, or listened to, into a your personal memex and sprinkling in a bit of search/AI technology seems like an interesting, if not winning, proposition. If nothing else, repeated elements like This Day in History can be semi-automated.
And I think I’ll give Pluralistic a try.