Best and worst ideas of the day - Dan Carlin and Blog2Print

This began as a 100% positive post, extolling the virtues of a newly discovered addiction but just came across a product on the other side of the spectrum. First the addiction...

Some of you know or have gathered from early posts that I am an avid listener to podcasts. I used to listen to political talk radio all day long until I discovered World Soccer Daily, a 2-hour daily satellite radio show that I subscribed on iTunes (thanks Slick). This and other footy podcasts were fantastic for making menial jobs or long drives go by quickly. Recently WSD went off the air and I was stuck with lots of time and nothing to podcast. Then I stumbled upon a show by a guy named Dan Carlin called Hardcore History.

I love history. I have a degree in history and was turned off to continued study not by the difficulty of further degrees but by the idiotic simplicity of the BA that I received. I have often been told that I explain historical events in a way that makes it interesting and understandable for people who previously had no interest in the topic. If I am 1/10 as interesting to other people as Dan Carlin is to me, I may have to reconsider going into teaching. This guy is fascinating.

I downloaded my first of his podcasts (1st in a series about the eastern front in WWII) on Thursday at lunch and I have already finished that series and another about the Punic Wars. That's over 7 hours of content consumed in less than 36 hours of life. My appetite for footy news was never that voracious. If you sometimes hear something on the news and wonder "What's the back-story to that?" or just feel embarrassed that you don't know much about the world, go to Hardcore History on iTunes and pick a show that looks interesting.


Now the bad...


On Blogger they have a site called Blogger Buzz that talks about new features and related content. Recently they talked about a service called Blog2Print which may the worst use of technological creativity I have ever come across. Basically it gives you the ability to take your blog and turn it into a printed, bound book. How pompous is that?!? If your skills are up to it write an actual manuscript and get published. If not, just keep it online (everyone is trying to go paperless anyway, right?).


It's not that I can't see a possible value to the service (ie. printing the daily entries during the process of having a child or some other important on-going event) but when I catch this update after having perused my blog and others which are equally silly and amateurish, I can't help but laugh.



Update: I found a new bad that's worse than Blog2Print. With Safari, the new Blogger publisher doesn't allow you to paste content into the pop-up windows. That means that you need to manual enter those huge URLs or HTML codes into this blank. Not gonna happen. This post has links but you must view the actual blog page (not aggregator) in order to see them. Sorry.