I reached a milestone of sorts about half an hour ago–one I might typically discuss in the Bibs & Blather section of Cites & Insights, but I’m thinking that most Bibs & Blather stuff (the “editorial/how we do it good” section) may belong here, rather than in C&I itself.
[Would that truly ungainly sentence/paragraph be any better if I was writing it for C&I? I’d like to think so, but I would be reluctant to make such an assertion.]
The milestone? I’ve emptied the “Trends & Quick Takes” manila folder–which is to say, I’ve dealt with all the stuff from days before I started using delicious to flag future source material for C&I.
Yes, that means another T&QT essay in which most, if not all, of the source material is fairly old–but it does bring things up to at least March 2009. It’s a start. (It’s also about 5,000 words long…)
The danger with delicious, of course, is that it’s easier to tag an article than it is to print out the first page–and I may be tagging way too much stuff as a result. But that’s OK; I’m now doing second passes and filtering out stuff (and reorganizing it) periodically.
The great thing about delicious, in addition to ease, is that I can use it for work and for C&I–the same piece may be appropriate for both venues. That could happen anyway, but it’s more likely this way.
(When I do a scan of my tags, which I do at least once a week, I can also see “looming” situations, where one tag is getting awfully big–noting that I delete delicious items once I’ve dealt with them. Right now, for example, there’s a huge “loom” in amongst the almost-1,000 total items: “gbs”–short for Google Book Search/Google Book Settlement, currently at more than 150 items. I might do a theme issue, I might do an essay…or I might decide that I have little useful to add and untag all 150+ items. We’ll see, most probably after this week’s hearing.)
