Working on the railroad

UPDATE: In the move to Blogspot from ipsoSacto, I haven't bothered to move over several posts that simply counted how many posts I processed. The post below explains my objective in keeping track of the work spent on the project.

For the next few days I'm going to keep a running log of the time spent related Blog Watch and other aspects of this site. I'm interested in how much time it takes and the goal is to decide if the product is worth the effort.

For instance, I've been off on vacation all of this week and yet I produced a weekly Blog Watch article for Forum and still updated the categories for the Feed Your Interest.

So, today, I started at 2:22 with more than 100 blog items to review in Google Reader.

By 3:10 I was close to being done, but I had to take a break to bring Richard home from school.

Back at 3:32 to take care of the last eight blog posts.

And done at 3:36.

It occurred to me that the whole Blog Watch and related efforts have timeliness issues that ought to be addressed. For instance, some of this stuff won't appear until I "make it so ." That's not going to work with the "politics" section since at least two sites currently offer live blog aggregation efforts. But there is no reason why most of the politics stuff couldn't be fed live. The only reason I have to look at anything at all is the whole issue of profanity and that's not an issue with at least 90 percent of the politics content.

But on the other topics something else is needed. Today as I was going through the blogs it occurred to me that it would be fun to provide a running commentary on the blogosphere, a little value-added for the stream of content I'm generating. As far as I am concerned, the potential benefit for the program is the ability to slice and dice the content so that everyone can find something to interest them.

Got a message from a blogger about a move of his blog to a new domain. I took care of adding the new blog and deleting the old reference.

Back with the blogs at 8:14 while taking a break from the Friday night SciFi channel ritual. At least next year Battlestar Galactica moves to Sunday evenings.

Done at 8:41 but I must admit to some heavy distraction first from Time Magazine's 2006 in photos. Having studied photography in college and landed my first job as a combo reporter/photographer I'm always interested in images. Then another blogger mentioned being inundated with office party sweets and I suggested using the Party Excuse Generator.

Both distractions point up one of the side benefits of the project: I get to hear about neat stuff. OK, it's maybe not important stuff, but it is neat.

... to be continuted throughout the day ...