kate carruthers

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How I decide what and when to blog

09 November 2008 in Personal by Stilgherrian | 2 comments

Photograph of Kate Carruthers

That well-respected and mostly-respectable renaissance woman Kate Carruthers has asked me (and four others) this: “And how do YOU decide how/what/when to blog?” Good question, Kate.

Actually, why do I blog at all?

I have four answers, and they overlap.

1. Because I can. I enjoy writing. Sometimes other people seem to enjoy it too, even to the point of paying me money. I gives me pleasure, and I can do it while sipping wine at my local pub. Unlike masturbation.

When I’m writing for pleasure I tend to produce observational essays like Saturday Night at The Duke and Burnt out sofa, burnt out life, or satire like The Inaugural Paul Neil Milne Johnstone Award goes to….

I usually write this material because some vivid observation kicked it off and, after a not-too-long gap, I found a spare hour or two to record the words.

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Twitter’s having a whale of a time

25 May 2008 in Internet by Stilgherrian | 3 comments

Screenshot of Twitter: Twitter is currently down for database replication catchup

As I write this, Twitter is down for a “database replication catchup”. Sounds technical. As I hinted before, and as Kate Carruthers agrees, it’s make or break time for this most cool of messaging services.

It’s ironic that Twitter’s ability to connect us humans into an almost-instantaneous global network was a core theme of Mark Pesce’s keynote presentation at Microsoft’s ReMIX 08 last week. The very week he extols Twitter’s strengths, it collapses. And they don’t know why.

At least Twitter has responded to community calls for more transparency.

In Twittering About Architecture, Alex Payne admits they built it wrong from the beginning.

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we’ve tried to make our system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that’s introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability.

I don’t need to repeat my call for less haste in web development — and in the world generally — do I?

Twitter has just received another $15M investment. Take the time to get it right, guys. But quickly.