blogging

Mena Trott on where the women bloggers are
In IRC, I once got chewed out for the same distinction she makes, that is, political weblogs written predominately by men and knitting bloggers written predominantly by women.
Micah recaps the Bloggercon in Shanghai, plus lists a few of the Chinese equivalents of Web 2.0 buzzwords
"语义网 (semantic web) vs 语境网 (contextual web), 微支付 (microformats), 开源 (open source), and 标签 (tag)"

Weekend Bloggers

At Urban Vancouver, Ray wonders what bloggers do during the weekends. I wondered that myself, since the best and most writing seems to come on weekdays, where on weekends bloggers either have lives or, like Ray suggests, don't have access to the work computer. My computer is my work computer. Maybe most bloggers would just rather not provide evidence that they are sitting at home on Friday and Saturday nights?

This weekend being an exception—as I travelled to Courtenay, Victoria, then back to Vancouver from Thursday to Saturday—most weekends involve me sitting around working on either catching up with my personal reading, writing, and sometimes, my being on salary, catching up with some work. Next week is a long weekend, and other than a planned site migration, I have no plans to do anything, with friends or otherwise.

China Blog List
Weblog usability
I wondered when he'd get to covering weblogs.
Blog Crushes
It would have been more exciting if it were for listing peoples actual crushes on bloggers.

Majority Bloggers

Duncan says that geek bloggers can now count themselves among a dying breed and that this is the era of "consumer bloggers". Minor mistake (it was Bar camp, not "Basecamp") and omissions (the food and knitting blogger community saw its rise during 2002-2004 as well) he gets the label wrong for the now most prevalent type of new blogger. First of all, because they are blogging, they are producers as well as consumers. Second the label 'consumer bloggers' obscures the diversity of topics individual bloggers cover one the one hand and the diversity of single-topic weblogs that have appeared in the last couple of years. It's pretty safe to say that every topic has a website for it and we're getting close to being able to say that there's a weblog for every topic.

Duncan is right to point out the large amount of people using MSN Spaces, though it's in no way the only service that people would like to say are in the majority are using. Conversations amongst friends are also taking place on BlogSpot, LiveJournal, Xanga, and Myspace weblogs, to name only a few of the free or cheap services that people are using essentially to have and continue having conversations with a small group of people, usually friends and family and whoever happens to discover their weblog, usually with entries free of links. So in that respect, geek bloggers aren't (weren't?) the only 'insular' types of bloggers out there. The assumption is still that this "new" type of blogger is someone that companies should analyze as potential buyers of their products is fine, but they are so much more than just consumers. They're mothers, husbands, baseball players, students, singers, readers, writers, lovers (though not necessarily at the same time!) and many other things that don't necessarily fall into a neat little category. The best label I can come up with is "majority bloggers", which is a subset—a rather large subset, and over time probably increasing in proportion—of the Majority Web. They'll be writing as if they think a few people are reading, and yes, consuming as they go along, but also communicating with the people they care about—and sometimes the people they don't care about—which is where the web is and ought to be going.

Stephen Downes on increasing readers to your weblog
I find it interesting that it's 2005 and people are still writing articles like this.
Why do bloggers sleep?
Waitaminute, bloggers sleep?

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