My Blog is Still Dumb

7 years of blogging and my blog is still dumb. Yes, it has advanced beyond the horse and carriage days of 1998, when i had to manually enter the date onto each posting. And beyond 2002 when i had to manually enter the comments collected from emails. And yes, RSS feeds (2003) have helped others read my blog in a smarter way. But it is still dumb.

I guess we have evolved from the carriage to the automobile, but alas, it is a Model A Ford and not yet a smart BMW that tunes itself and tells the mechanic what is not functioning.

The year is 2005, and my blog should be a lot smarter than it is. Emergent software is out there, everywhere, but smart blogs are not. This is a shame. If i was geeky enough to program emergent software for my own blog, then here are some things that my blog should do:

– People should see who else is reading my blog at the moment. I have seen this on other web sites like bloggerforum.com but I dont see an easy way to add this function to my blog. Thats an easy one. I guess i could do that if i had the time.

– My blog should detect my mood swings and change colors and fonts to reflect that. Perhaps a link to a smart coffee maker would give some helpful input.

– My blog already detects who is tracking back and who is commenting on the posts, but that information should be feed into the lists on the sidebar – continually updating itself. I should not have to enter it myself – that is sooooo last year!!

– My “What i am reading” list is OK, but i still have to manually enter the books that i buy. It would be easier if my purchases on ebay and amazon could be automatically fed into a smart list on my blog. A little big-brotherish, perhaps. But then it should allow me the option of withhold the information if i want to, for example, hiding a birthday present for my wife. Actually, no. Amazon should give me that option when i buy it.

– My blog should track the life cycles of my posts – who tracked it, who commented on it while hosted on a different blog, how much response it received, and if it was positive or negative. And it should do the same for me when i link to someone’s post, or join a blog conversation in the middle – i should be able to track the history of the thought backwards and forwards. This shouldn’t be too hard. Each post has a unique address – it could also have a piece of code – a digital watermark of sorts, that could allow it to be found and tracked in an historical sequence.

When technology took a significant leap in 2002, I decided to stop my vintage blog and store it for posterity’s sake. It is parked at tallskinnykiwi.blogspot.com and it is worth visiting for a laugh. There are no comments on it apart from what i manually entered. One day my kids will think it as hilarious as a wind up gramaphone. Surprisingly, it still gets a lot of hits and made it to bloggerForum’s Top Sites for Week #4 (number 3, actually – not that i am counting) 3 months after i had stopped it.

My original blog, Andrews Tea Salon (1998) was hosted by Geocities. We lost the password and havent seen it for a few years. Pity.