I find nearly everything interesting.

It’s one of those things about me that I can become interested in all sorts of different things and I like to know a bit about everything. At some level I just want to know everything, but that’s a pretty unrealistic goal. I’ve had conversations recently along the lines that the ability to find something interesting in anything is kind of a geeky trait – or maybe just a mark of intelligence – but it’s a trait that I relish in myself. it also goes some way to explaining why, particularly in this Internet age, I’ve become a bit of a news junkie.

It’s great and it’s terrible; a blessing and curse. It’s great because I can satiate my thirst for knowledge and read breaking news, opinion, commentary and all sorts of tidbits just about whenever I want. I’ve got quick links on both home and work computers to sites such as the Sydney Morning Herald, digg (a great newer find), Slashdot, Whirlpool, Wikipedia and a few other news and reference services.

One of the things I tend to do from time to time is email links to interesting articles to Tegan or to other friends, and from time to time I quite enjoyed sharing them on this site and writing up some thoughts about them, for example in this post: http://www.johnsons.id.au/?p=32. However, I also don’t really like doing it. I feel that not many people really read this site, and those who do do so because they are friends or family, and less because they want to know what I’m interested in.

Enter del.icio.us

I got started with this service a little while ago, mainly as a way of bookmarking things at work and then being able to easily access them at home – in the past I used to send myself emails at home with links to pages I wanted to look into more or bookmark. Now with this service, I can easily bookmark them online, easily find them again and, thanks to a Quicksilver plugin on the Mac, they’re nicely integrated and searchable on my main home computer.

Another advantage is that they are easy to share with others. By visiting ‘my’ del.icio.us page at http://del.icio.us/mistertim, you can see any pages I’ve bookmarked. Tegan has started looking this up occasionally to find interesting things I’ve found, and I could even add an RSS feed of my bookmarks into Safari or Firefox for live updating, or I could add a feed of them to the sidebar on this site so that, say, the last 10 sites I’d bookmarked in del.icio.us would show up there.

My links are, obviously, heavily skewed towards my interests – politics, public service, good eating, technology, gadgets and religion. If you’re interested, have a look from time to time or subscribe to the RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/mistertim. You might even find the service useful yourself.