Robert Young, please stop telling people what to do

I was about to write a short piece about the difference in blogs between commentary/news on the one hand and speculation on the other. I was going to bring some fine examples of commentary on current events, some examples of “so and so company will do such and such a thing,” and finally the most cheeky of all, “so and so should do such and such a thing.” And then I noticed that the latter category all involved posts from GigaOM, in particular written by a certain Robert Young. Now, Young is a wee bit of a big wig in some tech circles, and he did do some clever stuff, so I’m going to do my best to tread lightly. But I’m a mite disappointed by things like Maybe Google Should Buy a Movie Studio? or Why Steve Jobs Should Buy Youtube, or the most recent tour-de-force, Facebook & Six Apart Should Merge.

Vox and other funny words

First of all, just a quick word – I haven’t posted for almost two months, so I thought I should mount a minor defense of myself. Here it goes: I’m in school. That’s pretty much it. The beginning of the semester was a frenzy of getting my act together (still continuing) and now is midterm/paper season. With that said, I’m going to see about juggling things around and making this work.

Now, onto some useful stuff. First of all, I’ve decided that I’m going to stick with WordPress. The speed increase over Blogger isn’t a huge deal because I do most of my post writing offline (using MarsEdit or, more recently, Ecto), but even with that aside, I like the WordPress themes better, and I decided I don’t have time to mess around with Blogger’s somewhat arcane XHTML/CSS themes (think CSSZengarden – lots of unnecessary stuff just so you can customize everything).

Also, I recently got an invite to Vox, which is a new social blogging service from SixApart that Anil Dash blogged about a while back. I’ve kept a more “personal” type of a blog on LiveJournal for a couple of years now, and I’ve always been slightly bothered by your stereotypical angsty teenage LJ user. Not that I wasn’t one at some point, and not that there more sensible people on it, but that’s the general vibe that the global LiveJournal community gives off. Vox is a little bit more early-adotper-ey, and a little more adult and modern, and oh so very 2.0. I’m going to play with it for a bit more, and post some more specific impressions. In the interest of keeping my “personal” life and my bloggy life at least a little bit separate, I’m not going to post my Vox address on here, but if you know me personally you should have more than sufficient means at your disposal to get it.