Balancing Life Along The Path

It has been over 10 days since I made a post in this weblog. Not that I have been ignoring it. There has been a whole lot of tinkering and re-designing going on. One important change was to add the word "My" so the title is now "My Pathways to New Paradigms". This is my learning path. Some elements that seemed of minimum use have been removed from this ongoing web 2.0 experiment. Some new elements have been added . There are now diigo tags below, in addition to the del.icio.us and technorati tags. There are both diigo and del.icio.us bookmarks at the left-hand column. There is also a new Stumble Upon button below that.

It is Stumble Upon that has taken up most of my attention in the last week. The idea behind Stumble Upon is that you find websites that you like and that you review them for others to discover. My Stumble account has about 22 pages of weblinks and 19 so far have been reviewed. It has been an interesting process because it meant revisiting each one again which resulted in finding additional information and new discoveries. Furthermore, because of my interest in creating a comprehensively interrelated and interactive body of knowledge for myself, I linked each website back to the weblog posts which discussed it. I do find the insights of others interesting and have been befriended by a couple of fellow stumblers who provided some great links. The newest one is the xkcd comics further down below. Stumble Upon though is still not as popular as del.icio.us, based on the number of people who have saved a particular website under each system. It also cannot search for websites by the words in a title as del.icio.us can. Lastly, there does not seem to be anyway to combine tagging terms as there is with del.icio.us.

I have also joined a few groups: Emergent Systems, Complexity, and Digital Physics. Again, this is my learning site where I get to choose what I want to learn.

The most important thing I learned from the last 10 days is that my feed statistics don't change that much. The average number of subscribers was 14 and the average reach was 3 which is par for the course. More inline with the philosophy of this weblog, there have been 132 clicks to 37 items that have been made available on the web. One weblog post was Stumbling Through the Crowd On a Path To Wisdom. The Intuit Future of Small Business Report website also got 6 clicks. The MIT weblink Explorations in Language Learnability Using Probabilistic Grammars and Child-directed Speech got 4 clicks. To be honest, the max over the last week is 6 clicks for any one item, but it is still cool that besides having a platform for learning new things somebody else also had enough interest to find and click the same item. If one person finds something interesting fine, if 128 people do even better, but it is not going to be the focus of this weblog. Maybe someday I will attempt a weblog that endeavors to maximize readership. In the meantime, I have found far more to learn about than I have time to write about and every now and then I do spend time living my dayjob real world life.