I have been playing around with new sites and new looks. For instance, one new look for Burningbird can be seen here.
I also started a couple of new sites, at Tin Foil Project and Tin Foil President. I was going to use these for both social and political commentary, separating these topics from the Burningbird weblog.
The name ‘Tin Foil Project’ came about last year when I noticed an older article in a Texas newspaper about campaign donations from Alcoa for President Bush’s campaign. Of course, the former head of Alcoa. Paul O’Neill, is now famous for the revelations he’s making about President Bush when he was serving as Secretary of Treasury. But at one point the two were cordial, even sympatico.
I then started doing some research into Bush’s tenure as governor of Texas and found myself having to change my viewpoint of George W. Bush the man. I found myself asking a very basic question: Assume that Bush is not an evil man. If so, then why is he making decisions that are completely anethma to myself and to so many others?
I know that a lot of people who read Burningbird cannot see Bush as anything but an inherently evil man, but to do so means that you can’t understand why people in this country support him. Making foolish claims that only ’stupid’ people vote for Bush is only going to give Bush that many more votes. His reach to the American people is more complex than that, and those that indulge in primitive rhetoric only have themselves to blame if Bush is elected for four more years.
Anyway, that’s the premise behind the two new sites. However, I’m finding that the fragmentation of my site isn’t necessarily the way to go. For one thing, as has been noted, having different weblogs and then repeating comments across them is creating havoc with Blogdex. I’d rather Blogdex not have to resort to removing my weblogs from the database to prevent me dominating the top weblog spots on a too frequent basis, so I’ll need to consider alternatives.
More than that, though, is the fact that splitting my interests into different weblogs removes the context of the writing. The same person who writes about tech, is the same who writes about hiking, is the same who writes about Bush. How can you accept or even understand the context of any of the work if I splinter it off into isolated little pieces?
I orignally split weblogs off so that non-techs wouldn’t have to read my tech stuff, but the little icon I show with each entry should be warning enough – if people don’t want to read tech, they don’t have to. What I need to do is incorporate this into my RSS/Atom files so that people don’t have to click through from their aggregators if they’re not interested in the topic.
Besides, a lot of my tech stuff transcends just tech folks as an audience. In fact, my favorite tech writing is for a non-tech audience (hence the For Poets weblogs).
No, the separate weblogs are a mistake and I’m going to start pulling these together. I’ll still continue to keep separate weblogs for books I have written and am writing, but I’ll split these off from Burningbird in totality, not replicating comments from this site.
It’s a shame, though. I love the names of ‘Tin Foil Project’ and ‘Tin Foil President’. And I like the looks of the sites, too.
(Yes, that is President Bush, as a child, morphed into the photo of the Alamo.)
Maybe I’ll start my own set of group political weblogs: polemic free social and political weblogs with viewpoints welcome from all peoples, not just ‘right thinking’ people.
Oh sure, and what’s the interest in that?