Meta-Blogging

I like the prefix "meta-."

We use it regularly in computer science. I don't like the definitions I find, or I'd quote them here. I'll just explain the way we use it.

We talk about meta-data, for example. My name is Steve. "Steve" is the data. How do you describe that data? Well, to a computer person, it's a string of character bytes (one byte per letter, most often), five characters long, with a specific value. The attributes I just described are actually data themselves. They are data describing data, so they are meta-data.

I'm sort of a "meta-"-phile. I like thinking about thinking. "Meta-thinking" is probably just philosophy. But it also might be psychology.

Anyway, I have a tendency to occasionally blog about blogging. I claim that's "Meta-Blogging." Maybe I'll trademark it.

So, here is a meta-blog entry:

I've been doing a decent job at writing a blog entry each weekday lately. But my topics are quite haphazard. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I started wondering if perhaps I shouldn't mix a little structure into my entries.

For example, I could give myself a weekly layout: I can write about anything that's in my head on any day, but if I can't think of something then the day of the week would guide me.

• Monday: Movies or DVDs or TV (I tend to see these over the weekend, so that might be the tendency, even without the layout.
• Tuesday: News topics. What Really Matters could be a recurring topic.
  
• Wednesday: Faith or Religion
• Thursday: Friends or Games or being a Father or Husband -- things that tend to make me happy.
• Friday: If nothing else, a nice Photo or Comic to send us into the weekend.

So that's the idea. I think I'll think about it a while. I definitely don't want to be tied to a specific schedule. I have to be able to reply to something I read in Mike's blog, or point people to an interesting article, or just to meta-blog -- but I doubt I could do each of those every week. In the past I've talked multiple times about Words, Music, Time (that was a frequent topic, once upon a ... well ... time) and I don't want to regiment myself so much that those topics don't fit.

I have a feeling that a little structure could help free up the creative juices and actually make it more likely that I will capture interesting thoughts here.

So, happy weekend, everyone. May a little bit of structure free up something in you.