blogging

Recent Quotes on Blogging

In order to delete these emails from my sent folder—all of which were all to a friend who is writing a paper on weblogs and many (all?) of which were found at makeoutcity.com—I present a linkdump.

  • Mathemagenic: “In a forum you have to read most of the posts to get to the point, but weblogs provide multiple coherent "views" on a distributed discussion simply because each author tries to make his weblog meaningful. This provides a reader with choice of "entry points": I can always select weblogs fitting my level of understanding and preferred reading style and use them as "lenses" to grasp what's going on.” So weblogs are kind of like soap operas, except you get to choose where you want to start. If you start from the last post and follow along, though, you'll eventually get the idea of what's going on.
  • Naomi Darvell: “At its best, blogging is all about change. The format suits writers who want to move fast. This year, the blog world has been evolving on a grand scale. "Bacchus," of Erosblog, says, "The summer crop of hot new sex blogs continues to amaze me." Me too. Also amazing: the amount of mainstream attention sexblogs are getting. Reverse Cowgirl [...] is linked by such major non-sex blogs as Glenn Reynolds's Instapundit. Breslin has appeared on Politically Incorrect.”
  • Dave Weinberger: “Blogging turns you into a carnivore.” Well, I was a carnivore before starting blogging.
  • Paul Bausch: “Professional reporters are good at putting things in context, but they don't have the depth of knowledge in specific areas that the people they're covering (and often their readers) do. The weblog format provides the structure for people to write about their daily lives--and journalists could look to this as a source of expert knowledge.”
  • Susan Mernit: “The topic of privacy and what you do and don't write on your blog--both your personal blog and a workplace blog--interests me as a question of privacy, but also of voice, of how bloggers present themselves. After all, blogs are personas. We emphasize particular aspects of ourselves, allow things we want to share to be revealed, and try to obscure those we consider private, want to hide, or are not aware of.” Today, there was something on my mind that I almost blogged before a nap, then thought the better of it.
  • This has nothing to do with blogging, but I think the quote is funny: “Women who have never had sex with men were less likely to have ever undergone a pelvic examination, the study says.” Sounds about right.

With BloggerCon almost underway, there will be an explosion of weblog-related posts in the coming week. Not that having a paper due on Monday is helping matters for me.

Linking to the Wheat

Ole Eichhorn: “Bloggers are interesting sources of information and analysis, and entertainment as well. But did you ever think of them as filters?” Yup. A couple days ago, I whittled down my blog reading list by dumping those that haven't done anything for me lately and keeping those that are basically filters as well as a very few that deliver original analysis and comment. I also eliminated all newspapers except The Christian Science Monitor (the bloggers who filter for me seem not to have this excellent paper on their radars) and The New York Times' Opinion page. (Brief one-sentence summaries of articles from those papers are delivered to my news aggregator of choice, SharpReader.) I did this in part because of an anticipated severe reduction in free time, but also because I'm a lazy, lazy man.

The definition of a good weblog, for me, is one that separates the wheat from the chaff then links to the wheat.

The emphasis in the quote at the top has been removed, and the weblog entry in question was found via a rather reliable filter of late, makeoutcity.

Weblogging as Safety Valve

At Joi Ito's weblog, I learned yesterday that a frequenter of the #joiito IRC channel killed himself on Friday. It's really eerie, and would probably be discussed on User Not Found if the weblog were active.

I echo Scoble when he says “It's also one reason I write about my personal life. Weblogging is a safety valve.” I do have to disagree with Scoble in a followup piece: mazeone would have been best off seeking professional medical help before doing research on the Web. (That's not to suggest that the Web isn't an excellent resource, because it is; but it is very dangerous to diagnose oneself, especially when the Internet is the sole information resource.) Weblogging may be a safety valve, but it's not the only one.

Big Global Circle Jerk

chunshek: I'm telling you. This thing called the Web... it's all a big global circle jerk.
sillygwailo: no, that's just weblogs.

Oh come on people, as if I'm the first.

And then...

sillygwailo: on IRC, we (which is to say, they) were discussing websites with -ster endings.
sillygwailo: like Friendster, Fakester, Introverster, etc.
sillygwailo: one guy suggested circlejerkster.
chunshek: YEAH!
chunshek: It can be a porn-sharing site.

Why Don't People Blog on Sundays?

Phil: “On a Sunday afternoon, when I've got all the time in the world to carefully read and consider someone's post, follow all the links, leave a thoughtful comment and then blog it myself, there's nearly nothing being posted.”

It's as if bloggers had lives on weekends but not on weekdays. I have a life on neither, hence blogging on this Sunday. It's not for lack of having grand schemes for weekends, but they all involve having either a girlfriend or a digital camera (but not, surprisingly, both), neither of which is the case.

Public Delinking

Shelley Powers: “Remember public delinking, and how in the past this has been used as a measure of censorship, and as a form of punishment and control? I've been delinked, publicly and privately, from friend and foe, and believe me when I say there is more to this than a simple hypertext link, and the removal thereof.”

The blogroll at the side of this site is not and never will be an accurate reflection of the sites that I read and don't read.

Obligation and Weblogs

Mark Pilgrim: “I must have missed the part where I was put under any sort of obligation towards you whatsoever.” [emphasis in original]

There is no obligation for you to read my weblog. There is no obligation for me to read your weblog.

Jacques Distler: “The only real freedom comes if you truly don’t care...”

Adam Kalsey, in a comment to his own post: “You are blogging for yourself, not for other people. So feel free to write whatever you want. But if you are writing for an audience, you want to make sure the audience gets what they are there for.”

As A Blogger's Audience Grows Large

Clay Shirky: “The transformation here is simple - as a blogger's audience grows large, more people read her work than she can possibly read, she can't link to everyone who wants her attention, and she can't answer all her incoming mail or follow up to the comments on her site. The result of these pressures is that she becomes a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it.”

Pages