Does This Man Never Sleep

Going back to my last post, I was actually passing through Eamonn's Page looking for a point he made about my blogs. Looking through the list of blogs in my blogroll collumn, he can't help asking the question: "Does he ever sleep? And here am I thinking that running one blog and posting every day without fail was some kind of achievement. Ah, well." I think this would be a good opportunity to clarify one small detail here. The various blogs I maintain have very different functions. Bonobo Land is my real, live, on-line Weblong (that's it: the real thing). The various other items you will find in the list (Deflation Update, Euro Watch etc) are really only a convenient on-line filing system. Useful for me to keep my material classified by topic in those areas of on-going research, and also useful for you the users, to find material on any given topic (since the majority of readers arrive at these blogs via Google and other searches, it also offers me a birds eye view of how interest is shifting between one topic and another: if it's of any value I would say that interest in China is soaring these days, whilst interest in the euro seems to be plumming the depths).

My Website is another matter. This is where I try to build up a collection of material which may have long term interest. This is a long, slow, hard process, and I am only just getting started. To steal an idea from Eric Raymond I would say that my Website is my Cathedral (long, slow, painstaking stuff, etched in stone), while the weblog is the buzz: the buzz of the net, and the buzz that's going through my head when I wake up in the morning. This is also an ongoing research programme, I am sure that as I go I will change my idea of what I am doing and why I am doing it. So everything has its role, and every role is different. However, and as a warning of the dangers involved in building Cathedrals, it should be noted that the Catalan painter and artist Santiago Rusiñol once asked Gaudi about just how long it would take him to complete the Sagrada Familia. Gaudi prevaricated, and declared himself to be unsure citing the example of the great medieval cathedrals which needed around 200 -300 years apiece, to which Rusiñol replied: 'But are you sure Christianity will still exist 300 years from now'. A good question, and a difficult one, from which one might at least deduce that building cathedrals is a difficult business in an epoch when things keep getting faster faster.