One important lesson came when I was a teenager both from hitchhiking, and from, later, owning a (rattling '62 Comet) car - I call it the Zen of hitchhiking. Which gets us, fast forward a hundred years , to what I will call the Zen of Weblogging, and it is this: one offers the world the best one has to offer, in humility. Period.

IMHO, Weblogging is not about hits, ultimately: it's about doing the right thing when you feel moved to do it. If you want hits, the road is clear: become a celeb, a right wing uber-fuhrer pundit or a porn star. You will get hits... and the world will little note nor long remember any but the originals in your legion of lookalikes...

But, if you have something to say, then say it. Say it clearly, having thought it through, in the most direct way you can - in words, in pictures, in cartoons, or spray paint on the subway walls if need be. A common thread of history's greatest thinkers is that they were not often popular in their day: indeed many were banned outright. But they left their thoughts in media that endured... and influenced generations tens, or hundreds of years after they set those words down.

Marx was utterly destitute, sometimes working as a dishwasher when he wrote the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, and his words shaped the 20th Century, for better or worse, as much as any ever written (Gavin - I'll bet Karl was damned fatigued after washing dishes for 10 hours). Galileo's writings in support of a sun-centric system were banned for 346 years, and earned him life imprisonment: but those words helped shape the whole world, since.

But I digress... don't worry, Gavin, about being tired, or whether hits are up: worry about "Did I say it right, did I really get to the truth, as I see it?" Everything else will take care of itself...
Comments 10:09:58 PM    

Notebook works just a little more intuitively for me, so I think it's the winner, on this round anyway. I like the outlining behavior more, and single-click on links, and drag and drop behaves a bit more intuitively for me. You may well find the same for Notetaker, it's worth evaluating both (Matt Neuburg has a thoughtful, and positive, review of Notetaker over at TidBits)

Notebook will import photos directly from digital cameras... unfortunately, iPhoto is set to launch on my machine when a Flash card goes into the reader, and Notebook and iPhoto got into a grudge match trying to grab the pix... which Notebook lost when it went into an error dialog loop (fixed by cmd-option-esc) after I imported into iPhoto. Now I just have to figure out how to get Radio to render Notebook's OPML output into HTML... Notetaker exports to HTML directly, I think...
Comments 9:45:18 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures