All Things

Internet Duct Tape (formerly EngTech) has an interesting post about proper use of categories and tags in WordPress. Eric says:

“One of my first and longstanding complaints of WordPress is that it does not understand the fundamental difference between tagging and categorizing. Categorizing is like taking all of your socks and putting them into drawers based on colours. Tagging is like sewing a little label on your socks that says when you bought them, how to wash them, … Categories add organization and tags add semantic information. A category can be a tag, but if you use your tags as categories you’ll eventually have a right old mess.”

This is an interesting question because in my experience, there’s never just “one” right way of organizing or presenting information. To find an appropriate way to organize something, you must consider the use and the user.

The goal with tags, categories or whatever scheme is to organize the information in a way that you or another familiar user can find everything, while presenting it to a new user in a way which allows them to easily assess what all is there and then navigate through it to access what they’re particularly looking for. Consequently, I think it depends on the blog how many categories or tags are appropriate.

In my WordPress blogs, I use multiple categories with each post, so I guess that means I’m using them like tags, not true categories. This and my other Blogsome (WordPress) blog, RealCurrents, each have a few dozen categories, used like tags, but it’s not too hard to scan them all as they’re listed on the right side of the page.

My personal blog Light Side on Live Spaces is only allowed one category per post, but that’s OK for a simple blog like that, though I still find myself wanting to add a category every once in a while. If I had a lot of photos on that site, then I’d certainly want a good tagging system, however.

Closer to the other extreme is my aerospace blog (currently still on Xanga), in which I like to note all kinds of esoteric things and so have close to 200 tags,

http://www.xanga.com/AeroGo/tags

so folks can look up specific aircraft, certain famous individuals, manufacturers, etc. This tag cloud really functions more like an index.

For those who want to use categories more properly, as unique groupings, Eric’s post links to an interesting and fairly lengthy discussion by Lorelle VanFossen, Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags. She says that

“In the simplest of terms, I think of categories as the table of contents for your blog, a kind of general outline that directs visitors to general topics that you blog about. Tags are more like the index page of a book, a list of key words people will use to search for specific terms.”

She also includes a helpful discussion of how limiting yourself to a small set of categories can help you focus and really think through the purpose for your blog. Nevertheless she notes that she ended up including one category as a sort of “catch-all”, giving it a vague name, “Web Wise”.

Regarding tag clouds, I’ve noticed several ways of presenting them on various sites, typically with the more popular tags in larger type. While that’s a good idea, many times the tags are organized in a rather unhelpful way. I even saw one site where they were in a spiral!

For a site like AeroGo, where it’s likely that the average user is not looking for one of the top 10 tags, it would be better if Xanga presented the tags not only alphabetically as currently, but also in orderly columns, as in a book’s index, though keeping the varying font sizes. This might be overdoing it for many sites, but it would be interesting to see an experiment on a big site like Flickr of several different tag cloud presentations and the resulting click-through rates.

Like Google’s simple but (truly) helpful index, I wonder if on a lot of sites an alphabetical, index-like tag cloud might produce better results, though a simple tag module added to a page wouldn’t have room for all that. In any event, as the “semantic web” becomes more of a reality, I suspect more detailed tagging systems will gain value and prominence, as they help users drill down to the specific information they’re looking for.

Astroprof’s Page has an interesting discussion of the difficulties of science journalism.

I think the quality of science coverage is improving at many of the major newspapers at least. As Astroprof mentions, Mark Carreau has, for example, done a good job for the Houston Chronicle. Perhaps it’s a positive outcome from the Challenger tragedy, but it seems that about that time many of the media outlets here in Houston started giving a lot more attention to manned spaceflight. The “main” industries in Houston have long been oil & gas and real estate, but for quite a few years now space has also been accorded that sort of status by the Chronicle and several of the TV and radio stations.

An experienced, knowledgeable science reporter is hard to replace. I subscribed to Science News for years, but after Dietrick Thomsen and Jonathan Eberhart left, the physics and space coverage were just not the same. I doubt most publishers have the means to get into a bidding war for the limited supply of top talent, and no one could expect a relatively new science journalist to be able to match their reporting.

One of the problems with science and tech journalism is that folks in these fields often expect journalists to do all the work. Such a mindset would seem ridiculous in politics, where there’s whole staffs of hacks feeding carefully-crafted sound bites to the media and identifying “talking points” for their candidate’s every appearance.

Businesses likewise spend vast amounts on marketing and public relations, but most researchers, and even technical staff inside many businesses, somehow don’t seem to think these functions are part of their job. Of course, a lot of engineers, scientists and programmers aren’t that good at communications skills, or just plain don’t like to talk about themselves, but somebody in these research groups and engineering departments needs to take up the role of communicator, so the outside world can understand the value and needs of their efforts.

Journalists are under a lot of pressure with the kind of deadlines that most of us couldn’t even imagine, so it’s only smart to realize they’re going to need some help. That’s one of the things I’m trying to do with some of my sites, particularly AeroGo (for aerospace and engineering education) and RealCurrents (for current events), in which I’m trying to provide important but little-known background information and to point out things deserving more attention (which I generally categorize with the tag “Press Coverage Holes”).

Where there are failings in science/tech journalism, beyond just ignorantly trying to cover a field the reporter knows nothing about, I’d say that one of the biggest problems is that of naively swallowing pronouncements from big research groups without knowing what is going on elsewhere. We saw some of that a few years ago, for example, with some coverage of the Human Genome Project, that focussed too much on the government research, ignoring Celera Genomics’ private effort that ended up getting done first.

The result is that journalists are often lacking in understanding about the overall policy and business aspects of research, and consequently end up focussing too critically on superficial technical aspects. We saw that just this past week, when many media outlets were talking about the possible abandoning of the International Space Station, due to computer problems - what was a rather remote possibility, technically, while saying not a word about how NASA’s busily going about building a station they expect to abandon anyway, not too many years after completing it.

It seems to me that journalists ought to be a little easier on programs that suffer technical glitches that are really just part of the normal course of research & development, but be discerning enough to realize when an effort has really lost its way or when a policy has serious unresolved issues. With so much needless technical criticism, a lot of R&D managers are understandably gun-shy about the press, which just perpetuates the disconnect to journalists described above.

I’ve been reading about the rekindled Microsoft/Yahoo talks; perhaps it’s a good sign. It just seems so obvious that Microsoft doesn’t yet understand the internet, and so inevitably can’t really take it seriously enough. It’s got a dozen years of half-hearted efforts under its belt and not much to show for it, other than the dominance of Internet Explorer, which continues to slowly lose share to Firefox.

A BBC report quotes one analyst, Matt Rosoff, as saying, "I do not understand what Yahoo would get out of the deal, including that there are people there who don’t want to work for Microsoft." Well, that really says it all!

Nowadays, there are a lot of people who are trying to get away from Microsoft. After 27 years of being their customer, and 23 years of using a Mac, I’ve learned to pick and choose their offerings, rather than just drink their kool-aid and swallow the whole enchilada. I don’t at all want them to go away, but it would be really nice if they would be honest with themselves, accept what their true strengths and weaknesses are, and stop trying to be all things to all people, in order to keep most all the pie to themselves. That strategy is just not working anymore, and after years of disappointments, the reality is starting to be generally acknowledged.

As I’ve noted before, I thought MSN Spaces (where I have my personal blog) was one of the better things they’ve done, but they’ve made it increasingly Windows-centric as the Live Spaces rollout has continued, which has made it clunkier and more difficult to use, at least for non-Windows/IE users. I don’t expect Microsoft to be Apple, but after all their years of vaunted usability testing, they still don’t get basic design principles.

Everyone knows that Toyota’s cars aren’t that stylish, but they’re well-made, and Toyota (as it has recently) will put the brakes on to ensure a consistently high-quality product. Microsoft isn’t going to have the style of Apple, but they need to develop some decent processes like Toyota, so they can produce a quality product that meets customers’ needs.

Quality is a long-view strategy. In the short run, Toyota sells a bit fewer cars because they last longer, but in the long run, they sell a lot more, and pretty soon even more than GM. Bill Gates once said that his favorite business book was Alfred Sloan’s My Years With General Motors, but the days when one company could dominate a global market and put out mediocre products, in a strategy of planned obsolescence, are long past.

At least Microsoft is reaching out to a company that has some insight. I’ve always thought Yahoo was a bit clunky itself, but they are innovative and do understand the potential of the internet. Maybe Microsoft is at last acknowledging that they don’t get it, and that their culture needs to change.

I suggest that they start by returning to a more inclusive strategy on their online offerings. Don’t automatically expect users to be running all Microsoft software (e.g. IE and Windows), and so don’t penalize users who are using some MS software, just because they aren’t using all Microsoft software! In an era of open source and global markets, all that strategy will do is ensure that eventually no one will be using any Microsoft software.

Microsoft has to accept that they can no longer expect to get the whole pie, except for the crumbs, and that they better be glad for whatever share than can get, without coercion. They still have a lot of talented people; if they revitalize their culture and get their processes right, they could still do really well, and I hope they manage to pull it off.

I’ve been reading about the Twitter instant-messaging/social networking site for a while, and decided to finally check it out. My screen name is aeroG, and you can go there to see some of my initial annoyances, some of which have been resolved. After a few hours of messing with it over the last couple of days, here’s my early assessment:

Twitter is asynchronous instant messaging for adults.

While my teenage daughter is glued to AIM, etc., much of the time, I can’t hardly get her to check the emails I send her. I guess email seems way too slow for her. Email seems just about the right speed for me, because I don’t have a boss who’s expecting instant answers all day long. In any case, there are some times where a faster pace is useful, but I’m usually juggling other stuff like most adults.

Twitter might well be a good answer for this need, and it seems to be growing in popularity, at least for the moment. After working with it a little while, I can see that it has a lot of potential for news alerts (BBC, CNET and CNN, for example). You’re also supposed to be able to get a weather forecast, but as you can see on my page I haven’t gotten that to work yet.

I don’t know for sure if these pages are run by the media sources themselves, or just somebody copying (plagiarizing?) their news, since the updates are spotty. BBC seems to be the most frequently updated, but none are working at anywhere near their potential.

I’m surprised media outlets aren’t jumping all over this; it seems like a great way to generate traffic to their news sites. It would sure be nice to have all the latest updates from both the news sources and people you want showing right there on your Twitter page, and it would go a long way toward ensuring that folks kept using Twitter themselves on a frequent/regular basis, which is the idea.

That said, I can’t help thinking that there are going to be some serious privacy issues with Twitter. For example, I didn’t expect to see my full name displayed on my page, after I had to choose a screen name. Worse, when I tried to edit it, their system wouldn’t allow it. Maybe I can live with that, but I don’t see why users shouldn’t have control over that as with all the other social networking sites.

Obviously, if someone wanted to stalk someone else, their Twitter page would be the first place a stalker would look. You can set it private, but there certainly needs to be much finer control over privacy aspects of the site.

Despite these weaknesses, Twitter seems to have enough capability (it works to/from phones and IM services as well) to have a great deal of potential usefulness. I wrote how Xanga quickly evolved from a writing platform (reportedly its intended use) to a social networking site, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some so-far unforeseen application becomes the primary use of Twitter as well.

Well, I just signed up for Socializr. I thought that maybe if I signed up right away, I could get a page with my first name for the URL. It turns out I was right, though it remains to be seen if the site will amount to anything.

Socializr was started by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, so I guess it’s sort of like Friendster 2.0. I haven’t been too impressed with Friendster 1.0 which, of course, was the big social networking site (along with LinkedIn) before MySpace came along.

It seems kind of late to be starting another social networking site, but then none of the ones so far are all that fantastic, with the exception of Xanga, which continues to improve steadily. Xanga’s problem is that it’s being abandoned by teens for MySpace and Facebook, and has yet to be discovered by most adults (its original target audience), to which it is really better-suited.

Of course, by the time Google came along, there were already a lot of search sites, and it wasn’t obvious there was any room for another. The main problem with these networking sites is that they need to find a way to allow folks to have a lot of connections, without being deluged by junk and redundant groups, etc. (I noted before on my Xanga site AeroGo that there are over 500 astronomy blogrings, for example).

If a site can actually help you connect to people with similar interests, who want to connect (rather than just show off or fool around), then it could prove valuable for personal or business use. They have to for sure move past the collecting friends paradigm, though.

I can’t really tell much about Socializr yet, but I still think there’s a lot of room for innovation in the social networking space, and it would be nice if they can move things to a higher level.

As I did earlier with the Education category, I’ve decided to generally put articles related to the Christian Church and various religions in another space, in this case my blog RealCurrents. That’s where I’ve just posted a discussion of the management issues behind the controversy reportedly flaring up over churches attempting to move to a more “purpose-driven” approach promoted by pastor and author Rick Warren.

This controversy raises an issue which is common to all organizations - the tension between decentralization and centralization, between external results and internal order. This is a central problem in management, similar to how the paradox of free will is a central issue in philosophy. I note, for example, how Intel’s Andy Grove discusses the subject at length in his book High-Output Management.

Anyone interested in management needs to be very much aware of this inevitable tension between mission/projects/results and function/bureaucracy.

I wrote about Ford’s selection of former Boeing Commercial Airplanes President Alan Mulally as its new CEO on my blog AeroGo. As I note there, I don’t agree with William Clay Ford’s assertion that there are many parallels between Boeing’s recent challenges and Ford’s.

In a narrow sense, maybe yes, you can say that Ford needs to renegotiate union and supplier contracts, etc., but really Ford Motor Co. has been its own worst enemy, and is much more a victim of its own ineptitude and lack of decisiveness as any external circumstances. It was only a few years ago that it was the strongest of the Big Three, and now it appears to be the weakest.

If you want to draw parallels, a much better comparison could be made between Ford and Apple Computer than Ford and Boeing. As a long-time Apple user, I can assure you that Apple has long been its own worst enemy. Even when Apple did make outstanding products at intelligent price-points, for years it would suffer severe logistical problems that cut into the potential gains. Even in recent years, I suspect continuing skepticism of Apple’s ability to ramp up production of hot products is one reason folks underestimated its iPod business for so long.

The difference with Apple now is that it finally has a clear, focussed direction for its products and the brand is healthy again. In the same way, Ford needs to make up its mind what kind of car company it is and develop clear differentiators for each of its brands, whichever ones it decides to keep.

It wasn’t too many years ago that William Clay Ford was declaring that Ford was going to be a leader pushing for better fuel economy and lower emissions. Along came a few problems, and apparently that vision was tossed, and now, with gas prices up and highly dependent on truck sales, the failure to follow through on that vision is really hurting them.

Product-driven companies like Apple and Ford must set a course and stick to it long-term, and not constantly adjust to every external up and down, whether in the market for their products or their stock. Even recently, nearly a decade into Apple’s turnaround, analysts were calling Apple’s plans for the Mac unrealistic, that they needed to focus on market share, etc. Of course, the reality of the computer business has long been that significant market share gains are made on the mistakes of one’s competitors, mistakes which are all too common, and which even Microsoft has been making of late.

In other words, stability and staying the course are far too under-rated. On the other hand, there is one crucial difference between Apple and Ford - even when things were their worst, Apple had large cash reserves, something Ford may not be able to count on. But any “quick fix” that damages the Ford brands will probably just end up making things worse.

The sad thing is, William Clay Ford’s “greener” vision for Ford may well have been on the mark, and it’s a shame they didn’t stick to it. Perhaps a return to his vision coupled with Mulally’s demonstrated management ability can turn the company around. As with Apple, there’s probably a lot more life left in the Ford, Lincoln, Volvo and Jaguar brands, at least, if they can set a clear direction and stick to it. For a few years things may not look so good, but a consistent product vision will eventually yield leading products and strongly-differentiated brands.

I haven’t been blogging much this summer, been very busy with other stuff. What time I have had has been going mostly to AeroGo, which is slowly but steadily growing in traffic. In particular it’s been getting a lot of high-quality international traffic, so I’m hoping I’m on the right track with that. I’ve got a lot of ideas for AeroGo as well as many other things I want to do on the internet.

One of the things I’ve noticed about my blogs (four in total, so far) is that even though traffic is still modest, since early on they’ve gotten fairly good Google rankings. This makes me hopeful that I may in fact have a good sense for how to use the net to advantage, though it really took me several years to settle on a blogging approach. At first, when setting up and running a blog was more difficult, I figured I’d have to put everything into one blog, but I just never could see how that would work.

Though I don’t generally write about what I ate for breakfast, even in my personal blog Light Side, I thought it would be awfully presumptious to think folks would wade through personal stuff in order to find something they were interested in. The #1 issue in writing is to write to your audience, and with one blog it seemed impossible to define a target audience, at least for me. It wasn’t until last year that I resolved this dilemma of the one and the many, by deciding the solution was several, or possibly many, blogs, aimed at particular topics, with this blog All Things covering everything else.

I knew I was on the right track upon realizing that tightly-targeted blogs would get much better treatment by search engines. Moreover, several blogs linking to each other would raise the rankings of each, whereas one blog with many topics might actually hurt rankings

Right now this is how my blogs are targeted (maybe this will be helpful as an example):

• Light Side: Personal & Education
• AeroGo: Aerospace & Practical Engineering Management/Career Advice (targeted primarily at high school & college students)
• RealCurrents: Current Events/Issues/Politics
• All Things: My various other interests, especially Technology & Business, but also others that don’t fit elsewhere

Originally, I expected considerably more variation in the topics in All Things, but as it’s worked out, most posts are about technology and/or business. Perhaps this means there should be a separate blog for these topics, but I don’t have anything in mind for this yet.

Another thing I’ve noticed this summer, with my limited posting, has been that even when I wasn’t writing, traffic seemed to be slowly rising, except on my personal blog. While I actually cover quite a bit of stuff on Light Side, I haven’t really tried to drive traffic to it, at least yet (I still have some trepidations about that). Nevertheless, I’m contemplating starting a separate site to handle the type of personal/educational advice I occasionally write about there, which has garnered some interest but could be better organized on a separate site.

On the other sites, however, I wonder if I was starting to see a sort of slow-motion snowballing effect as traffic gradually grew even when not writing. The jury’s still out on this, since I was getting an increasing amount of comment spam until I made some changes, and so wonder if a lot of these hits are just spammers (though the large number of hits to my post about GM’s OnStar system - a prime spammer target - really declined after that).

I doubt much traffic growth would occur on its own for blogs filled with short entries, but when you write posts with a fair amount of depth (and several times as many resulting search words), it seems possible that a point of critical mass might be reached where links from other sites, search engine effects, etc., could combine to make traffic grow. It’s my hunch that’s the case for a well-targeted site, but even so it remains unclear whether the effect could be enough to be significant.

In my view the internet, at some level, is one big, giant, experiment. Actually it’s several: technical, business, and social experiments at least. As such, I’m trying to observe its behavior and learn how it works, insight that I’m sure will prove profitable in many ways. Of course, the internet is also a huge political experiment, as I expect we’ll discover, maybe not this time, but perhaps in two more years.

I wrote recently at AeroGo about Inexpensive Ways to Start Learning to Fly. I cover a number of ways to get started, such as the EAA’s Young Eagle Program, Discovery Flights, the Civil Air Patrol, BEAPILOT, and Cessna Pilot Centers.

For those not quite ready to hop in a plane, I also mentioned a number of good publications to check out, such as Flying magazine, AOPA Pilot, Plane & Pilot, etc., as well as some good sources for video/DVD pilot courses. There’s also a link to EAA’s AeroScholars online educational program.

To make the most of this ongoing discussion, see my suggestions from last time.

Now that even MSN Spaces has a book, Share Your Story by Katherine Murray and Mike Torres (due out March 15th), you’d think there would be several good WordPress books available, but a search of Amazon yields next to nothing.

There is Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress, by Robert T. Douglass, Mike Little and Jared W. Smith, but its Amazon reviews were very uneven, and only a third of the book is about WordPress, anyway. So, is there a good, take-it-from-the-beginning WordPress book in the works anywhere?

Apparently I’m not the first to ask this question. Judging from the many comments to this post, about half the folks think it’s pointless, everything is available in the WordPress Codex and other online sources. On the other hand, a substantial fraction think a book would nevertheless be helpful, either because they like having a printed reference, or they want someone to organize all this information in a straightforward package. As for myself, I’d like a book for both reasons.

I can’t help notice that the Spaces book is being published by Microsoft Press. Microsoft has had its own publishing arm for a long time, at least since the mid ’80s, and it seems like their software has done pretty well. My point is that a book is traditionally a basic component of marketing any sophisticated software. Maybe that time is passing, but I’m not sure it’s past yet.

There was a database package, Omnis, that was developed initially for the Mac, and stayed in development for many years. At one point a few years ago I looked into it, but couldn’t get past the fact that after all those years, as far as I could tell it still didn’t have a single substantial book published about it. I just didn’t feel comfortable making an investment in such an important type of software like that.

WordPress seems to be growing in popularity anyway, but it still might help to have a book on it. Considering all the arcane programming topics that get written about, the lack of a book is surprising. I’m going to try to get what I need out of the Codex, which does seem well organized.

In recent years, for most regular folks the standard way of starting to learn (or evaluate) sophisticated software has been to find a book about it, maybe one of the proliferating Dummies or O’Reilly titles, or some other publisher’s, to help get yourself down the initial learning curve. If we’re going to move to online-only documentation, which may be OK, then we need to make up for the marketing shortfall by initiating an appropriate way to point newcomers to the proper starting point.

I suggest the WordPress software have some kind of built-in link to the Codex Main Page that clearly indicates to anyone that lands upon a WordPress blog where they should go to get started. Of course, folks could modify this default setup if they want, but if most every blog pointed uniformly to the correct starting point, then folks would get to the Codex even before they ever start wondering about a book.

In this case, online documentation might actually be preferable to a book, from a marketing perspective. But every little extra difficulty that a potential “customer” has to overcome is so costly to a marketing effort, and every point of confusion or uncertainty presents such a difficulty. Right now, even the WordPress Development Blog, as good as it is, doesn’t make this plain enough.

Geeks will think I am totally nit-picking about this, but considering how fast blogging is growing, and how much work has already been put into WordPress, it would be a shame for people to pass it over for a less capable solution. Blogsome isn’t worried about overstating the obvious, and puts an ad to their starting point twice on each blog page, both prominently on the side and at the bottom. The link should be a distinct one, saying something like, “Get started blogging with WordPress right here.” If we all added that to our WordPress blogs, I bet WordPress would grow even faster.

I’ve written about Aviation Week’s just-released article on the supposed Blackstar spaceplane project, possibly run by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and aerospace contractors.

Long-rumored, apparently incorrectly, to be code-named Aurora, the project may have been cancelled but reportedly involved a mothership, a modified XB-70 Mach-3 bomber designated the SR-3, and several lifting body manned orbiters designated XOV-1, XOV-2, etc. The SR-3 was said to have been built using long-lead structural items for a third XB-70 that had been kept in storage.

In my AeroGo post I discuss some of the noteworthy features reported about the orbiters, in particular the report of a high-energy boron-based gel propellant that may have powered linear aerospike engines, a promising rocket technology that NASA was developing in the 1990s for the X-33/VentureStar shuttle replacement, which was ultimately cancelled.

I also note a few questions that may now be answered, and others that remain.

I’ve begun to tackle the subject of flight instruction on my site AeroGo, so if any of you out there have always toyed with the idea of learning to fly, you might want to see this post and then check back every once in a while.

Better yet, get a Xanga account and then subscribe, and you can get an email alert every time AeroGo is updated.

In this first post, I discuss some of the basic issues involved in choosing among the many schools and flying clubs, etc. that offer flying lessons.

I also note how options are expanding and costs likely heading down as a result of the new sport pilot/light sport aircraft rules, and there’s a number of helpful links for more info on these changes, as well as sites that can help you locate a flight instructor or flying club.

It’s been a very busy month and I’ve got a lot of things to write about, mostly small items worth mentioning. Hopefully I can get to several of these over the next few days. One thing I’ve been wondering about is what effect the rapid growth in investor interest in MySpace is going to have on other social network and blogging sites.

When the business press writes about social networking, they usually identify three sites - MySpace, Facebook, and Xanga - as the big three. I’ve really only spent much time on Xanga, where I have my site AeroGo.

AeroGo is the site I’m most interested in driving traffic to, and so inevitably I’ve been wondering how much the increased investor interest is likely to impact Xanga. They seem like an obvious candidate for acquisition, considering the valuation MySpace got from News Corp.

Well, today when I looked on AeroGo, instead of the usual message asking me to upgrade to Xanga Premium, there’s this:

“WE’RE HIRING!

Xanga is looking for a few good programmers and systems people to join the Xanga Team. Click here to apply. ”

This is an encouraging sign, I guess, that the Xanga folks are looking to increase the offerings of their site. It seems to me that there’s certainly more potential there, especially with the Blogrings, though these need to be cleaned up and tended to some extent, to get the worst of the silly stuff out.

One thing that bothered me about Xanga was the seemingly exclusive nature of a social networking site, i.e., that it was only for casual/social and not more interest/topic-oriented interaction. I wanted to do something specific to aerospace, and at least to some extent network with people interested in this topic, but it seemed almost too “serious” for a social networking site.

So far, AeroGo seems to have been pretty well received by the members of various Xanga aerospace-related blogrings (see to the left of my page for some of the best). I’ve even had a few very nice and grateful comments, which were certainly encouraging.

As I’ve noted, I think there’s a lot more potential with sites like Xanga and MySpace. MySpace apparently is oriented mainly toward music and dating (though the latter may prove problematic, and the site is now in the news frequently over concerns in this area). Facebook is positioned around college, and now high school, communities. Xanga obviously needs its own particular niche as well.

In this regard, I was surprised to read that Xanga’s goal initially was to provide a place for writers to “publish their work on the Net.” Now I wonder if perhaps I had Xanga figured out right after all.

Of course, Xanga has limitations, and I’m now working on a more extensive hosted AeroGo site, though I’ll keep AeroGo Xanga as a way to connect with those who are interested. Nevertheless, I wonder if Xanga’s best focus would be as a topical networking site, for hobbies, education and careers, rather than music or school.

Another thing I’ve been suspecting, but don’t really know how to confirm, is that more folks beyond the college years are getting interested in social networking sites, and that many are feeling more comfortable with Xanga. This is something investors might want to consider, especially since the out-of-school population is a lot bigger and generally has more spending power.

I’ve written about the Falcon 1 launch, now scheduled for Friday afternoon, on my site AeroGo. This is a potentially important milestone for commercial space.

I’ve also noted some recent developments with Blue Origin and SpaceDev, which has announced a new manned spacecraft project called Dream Chaser, based on NASA’s HL-20 lifting body design.

I’ve written about the Astros and my own thoughts about baseball over the years, including the 90s when I was really turned off by the second strike, etc., on my personal blog, Light Side.