David Foster Wallace predicted the curation boom of the internet in 1996.

In 1996, David Foster Wallace described the Internet as a place where “there are four trillion bits coming at you, 99 percent of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide. So it’s very clear, very soon there’s gonna be an economic niche opening up for gatekeepers. . . . Because otherwise we’re gonna spend 95 percent of our time body-surfing through shit.”

Blogging, I think, is largely about seizing opportunities, about pouncing, about grabbing hold of hours, events, days and nights as they are happening, sizing them up and putting them into play with language, like a juggler catching and working into his flow whatever the audience has in its pockets

I’m not sure this is an accurate picture of how I blog; I post whatever catches my eye (or I’m thinking about) at a whim’s notice. But, I do like how this is put and believe it to be quite true of most blogs.

Nick Denton gives some explanation to the jazzy new design (in beta) for his stable of sites. I, for one, think he’s right on point with the changes he’s making.

So, I apparently didn’t make the cut for Best New Blogs of 2010.

The Awl shows that much of the success found on the internet is simply to start doing what it is you want to do.

My friends keep talking to me about how they want to start a Web site, but they need to get some backing, and I look at them and ask them what they are waiting for,” Mr. Sicha said. “All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing. Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

This is the mostexerent advice on blogging and social media.

Enjoy the world of blogging & social media – be honest & represent who you are, don’t be like the many bloggers that project another persona. Treat it as if it is your own diary cum scrap book.

It seems that brands sponsoring bloggers is picking up steam.

For influential bloggers, sponsorships can be more lucrative than display ads alone, with payments reaching into the thousands for a multipronged campaign stretching over weeks or months. For the brands, it’s a way to market more conversationally to potential customers as well as exert more control over search engine results.

I’m not sure this is an entirely new thought, but it’s one that I’ve liked for a while now. If it’s done right it’s a great tool for both parties. And, I can’t figure out the difference between sponsoring a blogger and sponsoring a celebrity’s clothing on the red carpet.

According to Lockhart Steele,

I make this joke that blogs exist because people are bored at work — which is to say people with white-collar jobs and big screens to stare at. That’s undeniable.

And, according to Jonah Peretti, it’s the people who are bored at work.

The Bored at Work Network is bigger than any media network. If they like something and are willing to share it and pass it on, it will spread to millions of people around the world.

I agree and this is something that ties into productivity and my view on side projects. More to come on these things as they’ve been common themes I read about.

Julia Roy has it right.

OMFG! That my friends, is how you get a blogger, Twitterer, Flickerer, YouTuber’s attention. Do something special for them and create a bit of mystery and/or excitement around it. Don’t cut, copy and paste your marketing, but rather re-create, re-mixx and reinvent the way you market your brand to your intended audience. Impress them with how much you really know them and show them that you truely understand what their interests are. Get ‘em excited to talk about you :)

Here’s a little blurb from Cory Doctorow, who is the co-editor of Boing Boing, that highlights a little about what I hope this site will turn into:

I blog because I’m in the business of locating and connecting interesting things. Operating a popular blog gives people an incentive to approach me with interesting things of their own devising or discovery, for inclusion…

And, a little about why I want to keep this blog:

As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity.

…

Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.