A matter of time

The Blog Watch voting is fun. The random blog page is amusing. The Watch List of all the regional blogs is useful. But what about all of that stuff on the front page of www.ipsosacto.com -- the stream of "live" content?

The whole reason www.ipsosacto.com was built was to create practical applications. But just how practical is "live" content that's more than 13 hours old?

In theory, content could be streamed unfiltered. The timeliness would be controlled by how often the bloggers update their feeds. Everyone would be getting the stuff at the same time. There are two problems with that: sorting by topic and what I will classify as suitability. Many blogs could be categorized as "personal," but they also contain "politics" and "citylife" and "schools" content. Suitability encompasses the issue of profanity, taste and other value judgments. A lot has changed in the decision of what's interesting (see this Blog Watch project post), but does anyone outside the immediate family care about the indoor soccer game?

So far, the only way to deal with those issues is to have a real person (me) read (or at least skim) everything. This does provide an additional value to the content when it is timely. But when it is not timely, it devalues the entire effort.

On a weekend such as today, I can fit in a few minutes here and few minutes there and keep up with the flow of new blog posts that Google Reader identifies for me. But on work days, I'm limited to breaks between my regular production work. And those breaks have become much fewer and much shorter.

Last week was a good example of why the original idea to create live feeds of regional blog content just can't be done if I'm the only one working on the project.

Monday should be the day with the most opportunity to monitor the blogs. Certainly, it is not as bad as, say, a Thursday or a Friday. But last Monday I didn't have any time to look at the blogs until 12:40 p.m. -- 15 hours after the last time I looked at the blogs Sunday night at home. Wednesday wasn't much better -- 14 hours until 12:40 p.m. And Friday was a disaster. I didn't have a chance to even look at the blogs until after 5 p.m. and didn't clear the day's posts until well after I got home.

And what about all of this time I'm working on this at home?

OK, so its a hobby that also has some application at work. I should either quit monitoring the blogs or quit whining about it.