It is like rain after many hours of sti­fling humid­ity: it is like falling onto bed and being asleep in moments, paus­ing only to realise the sat­is­fac­tion of being still after a long day.

I can check my email again and be excited to see a new mes­sage, because chances are it’s from a real per­son. (Com­ment noti­fi­ca­tions are now worth hav­ing turned on and gen­er­ally sen­si­ble). At first it was sim­ply too strange to com­pre­hend, but now I am rev­el­ling in the bril­liant relief it pro­vides. Per­haps, now, using web pub­lish­ing soft­ware will be enjoy­able again.

I’ve been think­ing a fair bit of late about the psy­chol­ogy of brand con­trol (be that per­sonal or cor­po­rate brand­ing), per­plexed from a few months back when bands first started putting their myspace URL next to (or in place of) their expensive-developed-by-Sony/BMG/Universal/…-records-Flash-powered-yuppie web­site. In doing so I nearly went (nearly being quite a few times), “you know, the Live­Jour­nal crew never expe­ri­ence the kind of crap I’m putting up with” and switched. Of course, WordPress.com users exist behind a mag­i­cal wall, too, but that’s beside the point — If I was going to switch, it would be (at least in part) for social rea­sons, and there’s no-one cool using WordPress.com. (“Cool” is in the eye of the beholder — for me, Robert Scoble is not cool, or, at very least, not some­one to be emu­lated)
So, any­way, I’m not spend­ing an hour a day mod­er­at­ing com­ments. That fig­ure is truly obscene given that on an aver­age week I might only get ten to fif­teen gen­uine com­ments, if that. A lot for very lit­tle in return. I nearly switched off the com­ments alto­gether a cou­ple of times, but I’m too much of an ego­cen­tric prick to deal with that very well. So now things are better.

I’m now free to do more of… some­thing. I’ll prob­a­bly find out exactly what that is about the same time as every­one else. Besides, all the cool kids use Myspace or Face­book nowa­days, any­way, so the audi­ence isn’t a big deal much — only Face­book is smart enough to import my RSS feed as “Notes”, whilst Myspace is still gush­ing generic Cold­Fu­sion error pages. It is the biggest piece of crap hack­job high pro­file web­site I’ve ever seen. It’s a good thing their only rev­enue comes from adver­tis­ing part­ners whose ads are hosted on other servers, oth­er­wise I would so be expect­ing a mas­sively expen­sive class action law­suit when they get their crappy web­site pwned by some script kid­die who’s mess­ing around with a spot of SQL injec­tion for the first time.

Not that I’m even a pro­gram­mer. But I nearly found one today. Please be pray­ing that I get geeks bet­ter than the ones at Myspace for the cur­rent thing that’s qui­etly bak­ing away. I’m hop­ing to present it to nearly a thou­sand peo­ple over the next two weeks and haul in some unemployed/looking-for-more-exciting-work pro­gram­mers in that process.

Ran­dom obser­va­tion — It’s funny how I talk about that project on here with a com­pletely dif­fer­ent voice to the one I use on the other blog. I haven’t got any issues with com­plete strangers read­ing what I write here, so long as it’s taken in con­text (i.e. I’ve ranted about spam before, I’ve ranted about cool/uncool Soc­Nets before, I’ve ranted about how hor­ri­ble I find Myspace from a usability/technical per­spec­tive before, so my hold­ing them up as Thebes to my Athens is entirely accept­able). The prob­lem with writ­ing for a blog read once off by com­plete strangers is that every arti­cle has to stand alone. It actu­ally ceases to fit within the “blog” genre, because chronol­ogy is pretty much left for dead. Which is kind of a shame, but whatever.

In sum­mary: Akismet saves san­ity. Los­ing con­trol is some­times a good thing. Myspace is hor­ri­ble. Josh/CYIADA nearly might pos­si­bly maybe have a pro­gram­mer so please pray for “us”. Myspace is hor­ri­ble. Corporate/project blog­ging nec­es­sar­ily takes a dif­fer­ent form (mode, style, what­ever) to indi­vid­ual blog­ging. Myspace is horrible.