gor[b] Paul Gorbould: Words and Pictures

Speak of us devils!

There are indeed more than eight CBCers who blog. Way more.

After yesterday's post, I got a message from Peter Janes, who puts together an interesting site called Planet CBC.

"This site is an automated digest of all known CBC employee weblogs that publish syndicated feeds (aka Live Bookmarks or Web Feeds). The original list was retrieved from CBCunplugged.com but has been updated and modified since then."

Cool. It's a great one stop shop for a lot of bloggers I already read (Maffin, Ouimet, Gushue, Rowland) plus a bunch that I didn't know about. The "Contributors" list alone has 60 sources, though not all of them are current. (But hey, I did discover that Pedro the Locked Out Gnome is still around. Who knew?)

Here's what Peter told me about Planet CBC:

It's a "community of interest" site a la Planet Apache and Planet GNOME. Admittedly a lot of the blogroll are "lockout blogs" which haven't been updated for months, but I'd say there are fifteen or twenty that have continued to post. For the most part I've kept the list to individuals with blogs hosted outside the CBC, with a few exceptions (Tod, Rick Mercer, the "Making the Grade" project, maybe one or two others).

I imagine there's a stick in the mud somewhere who will mutter something about intellectual property, but it won't be me. Putting stuff on the internet and expecting to keep it under your thumb is a little naive.

Interestingly, Planet CBC contains - in order - all the blog posts I've ever made, including those from before I told anyone about my blog. I believe the site is automated to pull and order all posts from listed sites (you can ask Peter to add or exclude you.) But I'm not sure if they get updated with edits (e.g. I see that my old posts don't have the Technorati tags I added yesterday.)

It's another reminder that once you put something on the web, you better be prepared to live with it.

And just as I was about to post this, I received a comment from Ouimet. Along with some kind words, Ouimet explained his/her blogroll strategy:

Personally, I'd love to see more CBCers blog about their work. They don't have to draw blood. They just have to tell us what it's like, what's on their minds, and what's on their plate. I wish there were more of them.

So to that end, I made a "CBCers who blog" list on my own site, to draw attention to them. I know that it's not complete, but I also know not everyone wants to be on it. They might want to keep their blog or their job a secret, or they might not take too kindly to my "endorsement."

Also, some of their blogs are bloody boring.

Usually I write them and ask them if they want to be added. I didn't do that for yours, but I got the feeling you wouldn't mind.

And indeed I don't. After just two weeks in the blogosphere, I'm learning that it's both bigger and smaller than you'd think.