I am working with a colleague to finally finish up the new design I have been talking about since forever. The whole design will be wrapped up as an open-source WordPress theme and will be available on Github for public use. This new theme will open up a huge chunk of time that I have been devoting to getting this off my back. I plan to fully devote that time towards more quality writing. In addition, I am working on getting my life a bit more organized and structured so that I have time at least three days a week to spend writing. I have also ridded myself of Mint for the last time. That application sucked so many hours out of my life that I find it embarrassing to even think about it. These actions should ensure a higher level of quality and consistency for writing. There has not been a deficit in ideas, just a deficit in time. Lastly, I have a pretty interesting idea for how to collaboratively write long-form content. I should have more about that in the next few weeks.

As for the new way of writing, I am curious what you thought of it, if you even noticed it at all. I would love to hear if you found it more useful to have a level of observation added to each post or if you didn’t mind just having content simply reference other work. I’d really like to see this post to generate a discussion as to what you would find helpful from this blog and what you would expect to see in the weeks/months to come.

What really interesting here is that there seems to be a trend moving in the short-format direction. In a sense, Twitter is the world’s large public tumblelog. This stream-of-consciousness style of writing is obviously less substantiative, but the format is quite beneficial in its own unique way to both the writer and reader. To the writer, with less time commitment for each post, there is more time to write many more articles during the same span of time. More topics can be covered and current events can be touched on much more quickly. For the readers, they can get the gist of potentially many different topics and then go elsewhere for more in-depth content if they so desire.

The differences in format between blogs and tumblelogs could potentially create a strong symbiotic relationship between the two. Long format, in-depth blog articles are always going to be necessary for readers to get a thorough understanding of a concept or opinion. Still, many people many not be willing to commit to such long articles for various reasons. Tumblelog formats have the potential to whet the appetite of an otherwise unwilling audience. I myself would like to incorporate even more small-format content into this blog – I mean, who has time to read my long, boring articles?