1. Sleep Less

8 hour sleep is really for wimps — that is way too big a chunk for your day! And I am not even counting other associated activities that are attached to sleeping, or overhead on “context switching” using a technical jargon.

When you are busy, sleep less. People will be fine with 6 hours plus a few cups of coffee. Instant 2 hours!

2. Read Less

How many items are there on your feed reader? 50? 100? 200? What I found is that people spend way too much time reading news feeds on their RSS readers. Haven’t they realised that the entire blogosphere is nothing more than a big echo chamber, where B-list bloggers repeat what the A-list bloggers say, C-list bloggers repeat what the B-list bloggers say, and … ?!

Now, remove all those traffic jamming crap in your RSS reader, like Slashdot, Digg, Programming.Reddit, TechCrunch, TUAW, or even daily Dilbert! You will get much more time on your hands when they are not pressing J in Bloglines or Google Reader.

3. Blog Less

Did you realise how much time has been wasted on blogging? First of all, you need to spend time chewing intakes from the echo chamber (see point 2), and then spend more time paraphrasing what has already been said in your own words! Original content? Expect more time cooking these up in your head. I have just wasted 15 minutes writing this post, and I have not even reached the conclusion yet.

If it takes 1 hour to write a 500 word blog entry (which usually corresponds to another hour of research), write once a week instead of once a day leaves you 626 more hours each year! And trust me, no one is going to miss your writing.

* * *

Alright. The above is actually not my advice, but what I have been doing over the last week because there are just so many things to do. Busy busy.

R = (3 x A + X + T) / 5

R: Overall rank
A: Alexa Australia rank
X: Alexa rank
T: Technorati rank

Sounds fair to me, because this very blog is ranked number 17 on that list! I have no problem with the algorithm either. It is clearly putting more weight on the Australian visitors, but then again Alexa ranking is (1) never an accurate estimate (2) can be easily manipulated.

What I had issue with is, what makes a blog “Australian”? As I have commented on Duncan Riley’s blog, it might not be that trivial to determine. Because it is hosted on servers in Australia? Because it has .au ccTLD? Because it is written by an Australian? Because it is targeting the Australian audiences? It is nice to have a clearly defined formula to calculate the ranks, but I think it would also be nice to have a clear defined guideline on how an “Australian blog” is defined.

For example, I have a few other blogs — are they Australian blogs because they are written by an Aussie (and in one case, written for Australian audiences)? I have also written a small Python script to quickly calculate a blog’s “Australian blog rank”. After all, who is going to visit slow and ads-filled sites such as Alexa and Technorati just to copy and paste the numbers?

Here is the script, which is tested under Python 2.4. Do note that you need to have both Technorati API key (free access) and sign up to Amazon AWIS ($0.15 per 1,000 requests) to get the ranks. Here is an example when I run through my blogs:

$ python ozblogrank.py scott.yang.id.au fucoder.com hostingfu.com www.ozbargainblog.com
  43801: scott.yang.id.au
  27237: fucoder.com
  54284: hostingfu.com
  84713: www.ozbargainblog.com

Yes, from the result all of my blogs should have been made to top 100, and FuCoder.com would have an even better rank than this blog. Then again if all the Australian blogs are “discovered”, maybe there will be so many at top that none of my blogs will make to the list.

Another interesting fact — my Oz Bargain Blog seems to have the lowest rank at 84,713. However my server log shows it has the most unique visitors every single day. It also generates most of my online revenue (although it is not much). However it is because of the audiences it is targeting (shoppers and bargain hunters) that give it a low Alexa and Technorati rank, which usually grace technology-inclined group.

Anyway. The ranking system is flawed, but I am still happy to be part of it :)

Even if you don’t consider your blog a ministry, it serves as one. And, as we found out, you never know when one of your posts will become popular or how people will interpret you.

So true. Especially when your targeted audiences are young, technology-oriented, and most likely athists. Something I still need to grasp upon.

Fast forward all these years. I still read SMH in the mornings and in the evenings (and sync the mobile content on my PDA as well). I now also read Digg and TechMeme to catch those left out by Slashdot. And my Bloglines feeds — only about 120 of them generating around 500 new items for daily consumption.

Information overloaded? Yes indeed. That’s the age we are living in.

Scoble, Arrington and Om Malik mentioned the same thing in TalkCrunch episode 12 — people just don’t have the time anymore to go through that much news item everyday. Ironically that the statement came from three guys that can be said are news generating super stars.

These days I am also subscribing to quite a few “podcasts”. Or should I call “netcast” or “audcast”? Just in case you know… TWiT and its network of podcasts are my favourite, but there are quite a few others so I can listen to more overloaded news items while I am not in the reading mode.

The thing is, probably because I am not a fast reader, I found it is easier to digest detailed analysis when I am listening to podcast, then reading a blog post. Maybe it is to do with the information delivery mechanism — everything is forced fed into you, and you cannot pause and “think about it”, which subsequently produced an illusion that you can digest something faster with audio or video feed than text feed.

On the other end, if I have 500 items on my Bloglines subscription, it would be faster to do it over text than podcast, as “skimp through” just does not work well with audio and video.

Alright, so if you have listened enough TWiT or TalkCrunch, you’ve heard enough announcements that media everywhere is starting their own podcast. Companies here are starting a few shows a week, and organisations there are starting their daily feeds. All sound interesting — but without the inherit ability of “skimping through” like text articles, I am not sure how general public is going to consume all that.

At the end, I often have to tell myself “Stop Reading!” so I can actually get things done. Maybe I’ll go back to Slashdot + SMH.

I loved working up a sermon in the lead up to giving it. Researching, looking at what others had to say on the topic, piecing together thoughts, looking for illustrations and examples (tangents) and then practicing giving it and making the last minute tweaks and additions in the day before Sunday arrived.

In many ways it was similar to blogging.

Definitely agree. Presenting a sermon is quick — getting up there, and 30 minutes later you are done (unless you are Joshua of course). However, preparing a sermon is a much more complicated matter, and I feared that it is getting even more complex when your potential audiences get more sophisticated. It is now more than just working through the Word, constructing an argument, presenting the case, and concluding with an exhortation. You gotta start with a witty introduction. Best if it is something relevant and recent. What about something controversial? Oh, and don’t forget about the power point slides and nicely structured outline. Don’t forget about images and other forms of multimedia as well.

At the end, time for preparing a sermon can magnify to 5x-10x the time presenting the same talk. It would be much longer, if preachers today live in a world without Google or Yahoo! search :)

It is indeed very similar to blogging. Writing is quick, but researching is very taxing. I’ve often spotted an interesting news item, thinking “hey I want to write about it”, and by the time words are typed up, proof-read, few hours would have passed. Writing an insightful post is just taking too much time.

No wonder I have only been posting only quick links and pointless babbling.

As Ping-O-Matic is pinged by default in all WordPress installations, I would think that this issue would be esclated and wide-spreaded across blogosphere. Or was I the only one affected (yeah right, all my sites across 4 different locations)?!

Anyway. I am turning off the pinging for now (Options > Writing > Update Services — remove rpc.pingomatic.com from the textarea). Do so if you can’t stand the wait after “Publish”, which usually times out anyway. Someone has suggested Pingoat, but I think I try another method to ping other services.

And that’s FeedBurner PingShot. It fetches your RSS feed at regular interval, and will ping those service for you once FeedBurner detects a new content — all done asynchronisely so it does not interfere with your blog publishing. Since I am already using FeedBurner on all my sites, it is just a matter of clicking on “Activate” to make them work for me.

So far so good. Quick posting now. I am happy :)

At the same time it is also the same dilemma that troubles many on-line diarists (let’s not call them “bloggers”), who always need to choose between “to write” or “not to write”.