Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Academic Aesthetic Podcast 87

In this podcast I talk about my "Don't L.A.F." policy and come up with an idea for my 100th podcast.

Yesterday I was browsing my Furl links when I noticed a blog I had bookmarked but hadn't subscribed to in over a year. Wondering how things had changed, I clicked away ...

And immediately hit the back button and deleted the link.

Apparently some time in the past year a blog about a teacher's experiences in school had been replaced by something a little less kid friendly. I was shocked and appalled, partially because an educational blog had been corrupted like that, but more so because since all of my Furl links are public I had been linking to that garbage for I don't know how long.

Of course there's a moral to this upsetting story - a lot of us tend to L.A.F. (that's short for Link And Forget), thinking that those sites will stay the same forever. They don't. Sites get redesigned, repurposed, redirected, or simply disappear. If you use a social networking service like Furl or del.icio.us it's your responsibility to go through your archive every now and then and separate the good apples from the ones that have long since turned to compost.

It might take a while, but it's worth it and you might just rediscover a site or two that you'd forgotten.

In other news, I'm thinking about playing some audio clips on my 100th podcast which I should reach sometime in late August, provided I don't get sidetracked somehow. I've decided to accept just about anything, including simple greetings or congratulations, shout-outs, reviews of products or services, commentary on recent events, or even plugs for other podcasts.

This is, of course, provided everything is kid-safe.

Think of it as free advertising that will reach an exclusive listener base. And yes, by "exclusive" I mean "small."

If you want something played during my 100th podcast, record it and send it to me. I'd prefer it to be in MP3 format, but I'll accept other file formats if they're not too large.

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