Microblogging itself varies in appeal for me as much as any other kind of blogging. I guess the highs aren't quite so high: I've never seen a Twitter I wanted to bookmark. But they're 140 characters, plenty short enough to skim even if they aren't changing the world. I am not a huge fan of microblogging that is clearly written for either the writer themselves (unadorned having dinner working late without any attempt to write about it in a such a way as other people might want to read) or as an alternative to SMSing a significant other your plans for the evening. But most of it is about the same quality and style as the random jabs at the world people occasionally insert into IRC (in fact Andrew Bennetts should have a twitter account, but never will), so, fine.

However I too do not generally find people syndicating their microblogging to their main blog very interesting. Firstly, if I want to read your twitter feed, I'm already subscribed to it through Twitter, so having it pop up in your main blog is just two copies of the same thing. If the other microblogging sites take off enough I'll add people to my feed reader instead. The same is usually true of del.icio.us aggregations, Pia and Jeff Waugh being something of an exception because they provide commentary aimed at readers. I certainly won't be syndicating my del.icio.us feed any time soon, it's entirely aimed at me and if you want to subscribe that's your lookout.

For Planets, I suggest the solution is to add a sidebar or two for microblogging and links provided by Planet authors. This enables feed discovery and mild entertainment for people who like the microblogging, but means that people aren't stumbling on 30 character thoughts or unadorned collections of links when they expected substantive prose. In this model, people syndicating that stuff to their main blog are required to figure out how to exclude it from what the Planet aggregates.

I am not sure how to quantify the exact amount of evil involved in unsolicited bulk email (I guess I could argue that it's even commercial email, because you are a company promoting a product, even if it is a coding competition), but let me assure you, the amount of evil is exactly the same in 2008 as it was either time in 2005, and for that matter, in 2003.

So, knock it off already.

As it happens, one of my sisters and I have both been patients of Prince of Wales Hospital during our lives (in my case, my recent compression chamber therapy for suspected decompression sickness was done there) and so this should be a matter dear to your heart as a way of ensuring the continuation of the Gardiner lines in the eons to come. And the Gardiner livers, under-abused things that they might be.

Sponsor me through my Dry July page.

And now the Down key is mostly working, I can adjust my screen brightness downwards... at the cost of needing to restart X every couple of hours. So, there you go. I might even be able to file a bug, depending on what ended up in the logs.

So unless iTunes U USA and iTunes U AU are signicantly different beasts, it looks like all this is an object lesson (for me) in not citing without sighting (not trusting to a summary of anything without seeing the original documents). But good news overall, and my apologies for stupidly perpetrating confusion.