“In the real world, perfection is held as an ideal we humans always disappoint; on the web, perfection just gets in the way.” — Small Pieces Loosely Joined

David Weinberger devotes a whole chapter to perfection: how people pursue it in the real world, but must leave it behind on the web. As my friend Max Carlson noted, giving up perfection is the price the admission. With software incompatibilities, inconsistent bandwidth and connection time, and the ubiquitous 404 error, you quickly learn that sometimes things just don

“I know you don’t write, but do you read?” my grandmother once asked me. These days I find myself reading several books at once. All Consuming has created a nify gutter snippet that lets me keep track of and publish my reading list.

Reading lists should be viral. The blogging trend has created fertile ground for a number of sites that help people publish lists. I noticed this one on mamamusings. I like its layout — all I need to do is type in the title and my comments, then it finds pictures, authors and links.

I just discovered Mark Pilgrim’s Recommended Reading. This nifty page lets you type in your url and generates a list of blogs you might want to read. It worked quite well for me.
(I found this site thanks to a comment by Baldur Bjarnason on but’s she’s a girl).

I used to start my Saturday afternoon web surfing by posing an interesting question to Google, but lately I’ve been “ego-surfing,” as I hear its called, at Technorati. While some bloggers strive to increase their readership, I don’t mind living in a small corner of the blogosphere. The few folks who do link to my site provide me with interesting reading. I’ve noticed that Technorati doesn’t think this page is a blog… how would it know?

From The Truth Laid Bear, I like the concept of the new blog showcase but alas found no interesting reading. I added myself to the ecosytem. I expect I’ll be categorized as an insignificant microbe, and that’s fine with me.