Out of Control

I'm unhappy with the way I use blogs, etc. in my own work. I'm often asked for advice on how to do this well, so i thought this may be a good chance to use myself as a case study. I must have 15 blogs spread over various servers. this morning i moved them in the direction of a mature portal as an experiment. it is very incomplete. here is what i did this morning:

• decided to focus on three blogs -- Slow Blog, Haystack, Contours and attempt to give each with a better defined purpose. There is a summary of the role of each at the bottom of Haystack.
  
• started using haystack as a place to experiment with blogger features, so it now has a video feed, a poll, atom feeds, google news feeds, etc. as a result it is ugly as sin, but that is just fine. it is a haystack and not intended to be neat.
• added a feed from haystack, which has a short term and terse outlook to Contours (which attempts to have a broad outlook) . Also Haystack contains a feed from another blogger.
• avoided adding ad sense support to any of them. Haystack is probably the natural spot.
  

All this is immature, but i think it will be useful and no software development knowledge was required. i have better places to put things and they are beginning to link together in ways that may be useful. i did find that for providing links to my blogs, html text was far more useful than a simple list.

With a little luck, I'll summarize a list of next steps tomorrow.