Blogging malaise - Tired of always finding what I want

Gradually I've been feeling my news sources growing calcified - the web has shrunk itself to my daily dose of Doc, of Slashdot, of LWN, and Google News. Lately I get my most inspiring material via a private mailing list - via talented people that are throughly filtering comp.risks and the Interesting People mailing list for the best stuff.

The lack of essential randomness in my web experience has been dragging at me - I have been reminiscing about the Good Ole Days - where clicking on a "Random Link" was inherent in the first central search engines; it's gone now. Google is so good at giving me what I think I want (and I in turn have been trained by google to ask questions that get me what I want) that sometimes I find myself fishing down in the Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle zone just to see what I'm missing - what's not being tracked anymore (or yet!), or typing random combinations of words into the search engine in search of distraction - to get what I need - essential stimulation, essential distraction.

I find myself yearning for the facts - for in-depth journalism - for something other than the surface of things - something better than both a PR driven "Get the Facts" campaign and endless commentary about the facts - or lack thereof - on blogs. I'm looking for the antithesis more than the thesis - for every coherent argument by everyone I agree with I'm looking for a coherent argument by someone with whom I disagree.

So, I've returned to reading books, and going to the library, and digging towards the roots of things. I'm thinking hard about integrating both sides of Boyd's OODA loop into my personal and business behavior - trying both to encapsulate and understand the usefulness of the "hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle" approach, with my own concepts of manuever warfare -

On my reading list: Chet Richards.

So - of course - the long term answer is that more books need to get online - and I love that google is doing that - but in the interim, you'll find me at the library.

Yesterday, realizing that I've been filtering out too much of the information I get every day, in search of stimulation I turned off privoxy, the banner ad busting web filter. My god, it's a different web with that off! Every page seemed busier, every page filled with banner ads pushing products I'd never heard of - I felt out of touch - I even clicked on a few of them, discovering in the process a pair of interesting products.

I went and surfed as many sites as I could, looking for stimulation.

After an hour, the repetition of the ads, and the damnable gif and flash animations all got to me and so I turned Privoxy back on again.

Resolved:

Paying attention to advertising is something that should only be done with a concious mind, with your shields up, and your checkbook safely hidden away.

And still I hunger for substancial information - or to create it myself - I long for the barriers between acadamia's data and our own to be broken down.

I think I need to go to a conference soon - this malaise shall not pass without getting off the web and into F2F.  ¶ 10:34 AM