I remember when the Internet started being big news and a lot of the reports back from it discussed some cursory overview of an arbitrary aspect of the Internet as if this random facet was the whole thing. The old "blind men and the elephant" metaphor. This April PC Magazine article from Dvorak, Deconstructing the Blog is mildly amusing but neither succeeds as pure satire nor hits the nail on the head as legitimate criticism. A little of both, sure, but nothing a decent blogger couldn't have produced easily.
What most surprised me was his attribution of longstanding jargon (such as "grrl") to the blogosphere. Had he never heard of riotgrrls? Similarly, he writes in his facetious list of advice, be sure to use:
screed, grok, gonzo, meme, and other bloggerismsOK, now. "Screed" is a real word. He should look it up. "Grok" goes back to Heinlein and has been faux-hip ("hep") for years, decades. Gonzo is a '50s/'60s era play on "real gone," the title of a movie, piano genius James Carroll Booker III's nickname, and the sobriquet for a type of journalism practiced by folks like Hunter S. Thompson in the 1960s and '70s. I believe there's a gonzo porn genre as well.
Lastly, "meme" may be a popular concept in Blogistan but its hardly a bloggerism. I recommend that Dvorak read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene and Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and then get back to us.
[Note: I don't want to give Dvorak another entry, so I'm tacking on here that the article cited above was preceded by an earlier cursory glance at blogging with many of the same kinds of snide oversimplications. Even if he's been not getting it on purpose, that still counts as not getting it.]
categories: memewatch metablog
6:12:16 PM 
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categories: memewatch metablog
5:50:21 PM say what []
(Via Leoville), Jason DeFillippo of blogrolling has created a blogroll of bloggers blogging Gnomedex:
categories: memewatch metablog
1:28:19 PM say what []
I found a link from mulli.nu! in my referer log the other day and couldn't tell what language it was in. I guess Icelandic, for some odd reason, and dropped a note to the author asking for a translation of "Favvis: Radio Free Blogistan håller raskt på att bli min favoritblog. Är inte helt säker på att den nya layouten är så lyckad, dock." I could figure out favoritblog and layouten but the rest was tricky.
The author, Fredrik Appelberg, responded to my note, in which I said, "I don't think babelfish speaks Icelandic (oh, geez, I just realized I wasn't even sure what Scandinavian language you write in!), so I'm dying to know what this says."
He said, "Been checking our referral logs, eh? :) It's actually in Swedish. There is a small but thriving community of Swedish bloggers, of which a handfull persist in writing in Swedish. A few months ago there even was a cross-site debate about whether Swedish bloggers ought to write in Swedish or English which was rather amusing."
He also translated his post for me, more or less: " This essentially means that Radio Free Blogistan is rapidly becoming my favourite blog, but I'm not really sure if I like the new layout or not.... This was written when the layout was changed the first time. The current incarnation looks rather good, but I really think I prefer the original layout. It was clean and easy on the eyes. The new logo rocks, though!"
So, thanks Fredrik. Hope you don't mind me quoting you here so extensively.
Today my referer log shows me this entry, under the heading Islandska, in which it appears I am skewered for my language-assumption gaffe, which is fair game if you ask me (I have no idea if these characters will work given the language setting of my blog):
på vad det egentligen det var jag skrev om hans blog. Han medgav att skandinaviska språk inte var hans starka sida och undrade om det var isländska jag skrev på. Hehe... # G
categories: metablog
11:56:13 AM say what []
categories: memewatch metablog
9:15:01 AM say what []
