I came across this nice mod of a Guitar Hero controller and I ended up browsing the site for a while. Lots of fun stuff at instructables. Good times.

I’m hopping on the bandwagon. It’s time to kick start the Furiant weblog. Why am I doing this? Well, at any given time, there are a lot of things going on in my mind. By writing about them, I’m able to formulate these thoughts in a more cogent manner and it helps me understand better the things I’m thinking about. So to a large extent, this blog is for my own benefit. It helps me think and it provides a record of my thoughts over time. I’m looking at it as a sort of professional diary.

At the same time, however, I hope that others will also be interested in what I’m thinking and I hope that others will also learn from my thoughts. In general, the spread of knowledge is a good thing and perhaps others will benefit from things that they read here.

With this as my purpose, I don’t plan on spending too much time carefully crafting what I write in these entries. On occasion, you may find more thoughtful, researched articles appearing on this page, but for the most part, I’ll be writing what I’m thinking as I’m thinking it. Based on my experience of reading other existing blogs, this is how most others bloggers write also. So what is the value of all of these thousands of instances of extemporaneous writing? We are all very familiar with the disturbingly high proportion of low-quality material on the web. Wouldn’t we all be better served if bloggers focused more on quality rather than quantity?

I say no. To me, a web-wide brain dump can be very beneficial. Think of this process in terms of design or any other endeavor where the goal is to create something. One of the first steps is creative brainstorming where any and all ideas begin as legitimate thoughts. When I brainstorm, I don’t want to discount ideas before I can write them down. I rely on future editing and evaluating to determine which ideas deserve further consideration. I want to believe that high-quantity blogging serves the same purpose. Bloggers provide a great amount of thought in a very short span of time. In essence, it’s a web-wide brainstorming session about any conceivable topic.

The problem we face is that there is a lack of evaluation as a next step. There is no systematic process of determining which ideas that emerge from these blogs will prove to be worthwhile down the road. The current evolutionary method relies on blog popularity to reflect quality or search engines (maybe things like Technorati) to pull specific items to the top of search results. The assumption is that quality gains popularity because more and more people learn to trust certain blogging sources. But this takes time and is not necessarily related to the content. In a way it’s like asserting that certain pop music acts are higher quality because they’re more popular. There just isn’t a strong correlation there.

What would be really useful is a system of evaluation that helps determine the quality of blog material regardless of popularity. I have no idea how to do this. I imagine it would make a pretty good doctoral dissertation for somebody. But wouldn’t it be great if we could leverage the web-wide brain dump more efficiently? I know that there are great ideas and choice pieces of information being presented by many bloggers out there. I also know that there are a great many more instances where the content simply won’t make a difference for any purpose.

So let’s blog on. Let’s not deter anybody from contributing to the brain dump. But let’s also hope that some clever soul figures out how to weed through all of this for us because there certainly are gems of wisdom out there and I hope for a better way to benefit from them.