Sun, 03 Jun 2007

Blogs, Search, Sheesh!

I believe that blogs and Wikis are causing frustration in searching. I want to try to find out information abour writing JSR 168 portlets using JRuby. So I went to that large search engine which as become a verb and put in: +JRuby +"JSR 168". As usual I got results in she usual sub-second time -- about 1,440 results, promising. So far so good . . .

Then I started looking through the results. I found that a number of them were from Blogs. When I went to the blog page, I didn't find the reference I was looking for. I even used Firefox's ability to search for terms on the page and it couldn't find it, so I know that the beer I had while searching didn't affect my ability to find the subject.

My thought is this -- searching is actually two processes:

1. Indexing the Web Pages
2. Finding and displaying the results

It seems that between step 1 and step 2, the blog has moved off the page. The search engine still displays the result that it indexed in the usually rapid manner . . . but the result was WRONG when I went to the page.

Now the most frustrating part of this is that the most promising results returned by the search engine are usually the ones where this happens. Sheesh!

posted 15:03 [/Thoughts] permanent link

Time Spent Writing . . .

I have been reading some interviews with writers and it struck me the amount of time writers of novels spend on their projects -- 1 year, 4 years, 10 years. Now it's true that they don't spend all that time developing the single project. But I got to thinking about this process in relation to the process of writing for the web.

If something happens, it better appear in your blog within a very short time or it's not relevant on the web. News is faster, opinion is faster, everything is right now, or not at all. Things also seem to die down more quickly in the on-line world, but that's another discussion.

The process for these two writing forms are radically different. In the development of a novel, the choice or words can take a very long time. in the online world, writers seem to put down things almost in a stream-of-consciousness format. That is, they have a need to get something down and don't spend a great deal of time on the refinement of their thoughts. Some bloggers will serialize their thoughts That is, they might post a series of articles exploring the same subject -- much like I'm doing with this set on Thinking. Of course, some blogs are dedicated to a single topic and corporate blogs are very directed toward the product of service being sold. But all blogs seem to compress the period from initial idea to publication into, perhaps, a single very short period.

Novelists, on the other hand will start with an idea and then take a much longer period to craft it into its final form. Of course, that form is generally much longer, richer, and more detailed than the typical internet posting. It's more like the entire site than a single blog. The difference is that a site is put up and then refined right in front of the audience. Very few novels are developed this way. Novelists will vary in their collaboration on their novel. Some will not let anyone see it until it is done, or the first draft at least. Others put out bits and pieces for evaluation by readers. But, whatever the technique, the final product is not made available until it is ready for publication. This is usually after several rewrites by the author and perhaps other changes by their editor/publisher.

The ability to focus on a single idea for the length of time it take to develop it into a novel is astounding to me. I just don't have that type of dedication. Some of the authors interviewed said that they write six days a week. If this is on the same work, for a period of a year or more, my hat is off to them. I don't believe I could do it. But, from what I have read so far, that seems to be what it takes to be successful.

Me? I think I will have to stay with blogging and writing brief things which expand upon the thought of the moment. Perhaps one day I will get a thought so big that it can be expanded into a novel . . . but I doubt it.

posted 10:46 [/Thinking] permanent link