Jean-Paul Borda, blogging from Afghanistan, has posted his “golden rules of milblogging.” As always with this type of advice, it’s actually more like “How to blog like me” than a set of eternal rules, although “Don’t tell readers about military plans” probably holds pretty well across all types of milbloggers. And much of it transposes nicely for us civbloggers.

Of course, I already seem to have violated rule 11: “Don’t just put references to other milblogs in your milblog as a substitute for writing. Do you think the readers are that stupid? They’ll figure out that you have nothing to write about soon enough.” [Technorati tag: milblogs]

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I sent in my Thinkpad on Tuesday, in a box IBM shipped to me, and it came back to me on Thursday with a new motherboard. That’s damn fast service. Thanks, IBM.

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AKMA reports on the possibility that The Beast’s number may have dropped from 666 to a mere 616. Whew! 666 is tough, but I think with that 50 point drop, we can probably take him.

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Peter van Dijck continues his hunt for categories that are — whether they’re labeled that way or not — “everything else.” I find it slightly disturbing that I think this is a cool pursuit. [Technorati tag: taxonomy]

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John Siracusa goes behind the new Mac search facility, Spotlight, with an eye on the metadata it gathers and the facilities not yet exposed by the UI. [Technorati tags: macintosh metadata]

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For reasons I don’t quite understand, Gianluca Baccanico (AKA Jon Luca Botanico), one of the students I got to hang out with at the U of Napoli, has asked people to write a haiku about symmetry. Here is mine:

There is symmetry.
One half balances half one.
Symmetry is there.

[Technorati tags: haiku poetry symmetry]

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StolenA3 is a “fun, interactive, fictional story sponsored by Audi” presented in the form of a blog. It failed to immerse me, but I seem not to be in their target demographic.

It’s transparent about it being an ad, maybe some people will find it fun, and it uses the word “batshit,” so does anyone have a problem with this? Besides, the coopting of blogs is a sure sign of their success.

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To be miscellaneous is to be placed next to things unlike you.

Isn’t that pretty much a condition for innovation? [Technorati tag: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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Last week, after almost a year and a half of writing, I shipped my book proposal off to publishers. (Yes, my book proposal. The book itself will take about another 1.5 years to write.) My literary agent, David Miller, and I managed to cut it down from 28,000 words to 17,000. That’s long for a proposal, especially since I think the book itself will be about 70,000 words. So now I’m in the midst of the multi-week process of seeing if anyone actually wants to publish it. As we say in the writing trade: Ulp.

I haven’t yet figured out exactly how I want to handle blogging the writing of the book. I don’t think I want to put a blog at EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com (there’s nothing there yet because I’ve had some domain issues) because researching and writing this book isn’t an isolated act for me. So, I’ll probably blog it here, using the tag “EverythingIsMiscellaneous.” Yes, it’s long, but tagging it “Miscellaneous” really would be misleading as an external tag.

I wrote my previous book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, completely in public, posting each day’s draft. Since I woke up every morning and, Penelope-like, undid what I’d written the previous day, that wasn’t a very useful way of getting readers involved. So, this time I’m thinking I’ll post drafts of chapters when I think they’re readable. And then I will beg for comments.

And I’ll certainly post bits and pieces as I think about them. See the next post.

All of this assumes — knock wood, toss salt over my shoulder, light a joss stick to Steve Johnson — that someone actually wants to publish the damn book.

[Technorati tag: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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