Blogging and Writing September 15 featuring Doug Lawson, Mark Bernstein, and Adrian Miles. [artsflow]
categories: memewatch metablog x-pollen
12:19:09 PM 
say what []
I am a johnny-come-lately when it comes to using "Blogistan" as part of a web site's monicker so I feel guilty and glad when people like dave winer and dylan tweney add me to their blogrolls as just Blogistan, but it does appear that Google now thinks this site is the second most likely place people are looking for when they search for blogistan.
Number one is still Insolvent Republic of Blogistan. What a great name! We are broadcasting Voice of the Internet into your insolvent republic, brethren and sistren! (Last updated July 19.)
Then after RFB comes another predecessor, a. beam of light in blogistan. Great new entry today.
Page two, after some prominent discussions of the term or conceptual space, comes moose and squirrel in Blogistan.
This one also sounds early, by the domain name at least: Distributed Republic of Blogistan.
bonus browser's reward for doing a search: Richard Bennett's Omphalos: Blogtopia v. Blogistan
categories: memewatch metablog x-pollen
11:52:47 AM say what []
From blo.gs: related blogs:
Theory. It's all reflected glory from that number one association. (Dave is the only one among this A list who has linked to me...)
#1 Scripting News #2 Boing Boing Blog
Blogroots
megnut
evhead
kottke.org
rebecca's pocket
CamWorld
categories: memewatch metablog
11:43:57 AM say what []
On the fireweaver tip, some good new stuff just came in from the Macromedia Resource Feed (xml):
- Designing a Site with the CSS-P Method
- Writing Secure Dreamweaver Applications (not sure if that's a permalink)
- Securing Your Web Applications (definitely not a permalink —too bad!)
categories: fireweaver metablog
11:14:19 AM say what []
As a memewatch project I'd love to see stats on the appearance of the word "blog" in the New York Times. It seems that there is an article with a blog angle just about every day.
Today's is about LiveJournal:
All kinds of people maintain pages on LiveJournal, but the site's own statistics show that its users tend to be 15 to 21 and predominantly female. Many people who have pages at LiveJournal or similar sites like DiaryLand maintain that the form is distinct from Weblogs, or blogs. The journals tend to be more inwardly focused and offer fewer links than blogs, although the categories overlap.
Here's what was eay to find, just dates of articles:
- 1998-11-29
- 1998-11-28
- 2001-4-16 (2)
- 2002-5-5
- 2002-6-10
- 2002-6-20
- 2002-7-25
- 2002-7-28
- 2002-8-10
- 2002-8-22
- 2002-9-1
- 2002-9-5
categories: memewatch metablog
10:45:21 AM say what []
Still bugging me was my repetition of the phrase "trots out" twice in successive sentences. By the time I noticed it I did not want to trigger a trivial repost to my RSS feed (workaround? could the RSS spec contain a flag for reprint corrections vs. newly posted entries?) The line is in a different place for this medium from where it is when printinng on smashed trees.
I used to say that the greatest thing about publishing on the web was that you could make changes and corrections long after publishing something, but that this was also the most terrible thing about the web. A blessing and a curse, until you draw the line somewhere.
I know I could always preview before publishing, the way Matt Haughey's deceptively brilliant interface makes commenters do, but somehow this goes against the path-of-least-resistance model that unleashes all this writing.
That thing about repeating phrases in slightly different contexts is so familiar, the way the forebrain seems to buffer recently touched or used words recalled from some deeper store of memory, proffering them repeatedly. Just as cliches and idioms suggest themselves and require pruning, this slightly autonomic repetition of a phrase is one of the easiest things to fix when proofreading or doing a light copyedit.
My brother the artist reminds me sometimes about all the little drawing "tricks" I taught him when we were children: the little symbols and culturally agreed-upon simplifications that say to the eye and mind: this is a real face, this is a real nose, this ear looks real, etc.
In some ways the traditions of print publishing are another set of traditions with a little voodoo mixed in. I always felt that when I was hired for my first editorial job (as an editorial assistant at a publishing house in the east bay in 1988) part of what landed me the job was my east-coast college education, often no big deal here in California but in this one type of job, there was an intangible preference for familiarity with old-fashioned, traditional, formal rules of writing. The same kinds of markers that in other contexts indicate fashion-sense, taste, style, and social class.
So polishing a weblog may bring a little old-school classiness to your image, but you have to draw the line somewhere. For some, what makes blogging work is that quality of being "in the moment." For others, I'm sure, perfecting an image is paramount. I guess for me it's somewhere in between.
10:27:05 AM say what []
From explodedlibrarian.info (via Research News: The Virtual Chase) come two good blog-related links:
- On the Net's The Blog Realm about blogs as a source of information for librarians, and as a content-management solution.(Basic stuff for any experienced blogger but good introa and a reminder that this stuff still requires explaining on a daily basis.)
- SearchEngineBlog, a new blog covering search-engine developments. (I like these "beat-covering" blogs. Speaking of which, the Corante article on the new media ecosystem and blogging's role in it is worth a thousand snippies from celebrity blogger outboxes.
"But do not turn your back on the world of Weblogs completely until you also consider the content management angle."No, do not turn your back lest you miss the action taking place.
categories: salonika knowhow memewatch metablog
10:09:00 AM say what []
plasticbag offers a javascript tag for British blogs not participating in the Guardian's "Best British Weblog" contest:
The "Not the Best" project is really simple. It's a tiny piece of code that post or stick in your template that will add the "Not the Best" box onto your site. The box includes a link to every British weblogger who decided not to participate in the Guardian's Best British Blog competition. If you didn't enter and you send in your site's URL, we'll add it to the box and it'll be updated on everyone's sites immediately.Here's how it looks currently:
categories: memewatch metablog
9:40:20 AM say what []
Still not getting it, in the second day of this shortened week of pretend email messages, Andersen responds to some conciliatory comments from Sullivan with a journalist-centric view of blogging pro and con:
Proof that blogs are not scalable conceptually: As an informing principle for an entire daily newspaper, fear and loathing of the New York Times is not quite sufficient.What "doesn't scale"? Blogging as fact-checking of major media? That's just one slice off the nogging.
Granted, the next comment is in the context of answering the question "Are blogs going to drive a significant transformation of the press?" but the next sequence continues to focus on one facet of blogging:
Providing a self-publishing outlet for professional journalists' rejected print pieces isn't exactly, as we used to say, not so far back in the day, a killer app. I agree that providing talented unknown writers a means of getting prose in front of readers and editors is a nice hypothetical blog virtue.... As we've learned in every digital realm, the proliferation of groovy new tools to make and distribute media (music, movies, bloggers' pensées, whatever) does not expand the more or less fixed pool of genuine talent in the world.Well, sure, marginal is all you ever get. Anyone who says everyone will blog or all bloggers are undiscovered good writers etc, I say still does not understand the medium (not even as well as Sullivan who at least gets that the fame game is only one layer of the cake).
And the idea that blogging is simply an on-deck circle for people wishing to become journalists misses the point that there are new kinds of writing coming about here. Some people will do good blogs not because they want to work for magazines in New York but because they have a talent for blogging.
categories: memewatch metablog
8:30:34 AM say what []
If I weren't traveling today (jetBlue to NY), I'd probably get beyond covering this one dialogue. Here's a good contribution from Meryl Yourish:
And you're right that blogging is mostly an individual sport, but I think I probably should have explained "community" a bit more. Your site is part of what's often called the "warblogger" community. You can find a list of many warbloggers on any site in that community, and they often cross-post, link to one another, reference the same topic. Most of the blogs are written by individuals, yet each individual belongs to a circle of weblogs that s/he reads frequently. That's often what's meant by community. A blogging community is not unlike a virtual town, and it rarely shuts down.
categories: memewatch metablog
8:13:46 AM say what []
reverse cowgirl has the best summary I've seen yet of the weblog discussion in Slate. Some excerpts:
...then Mr Sullivan says he likes to blog because he hates people. and editors. then he says he would like to have sex with Moby... after that, Sullivan says that people are interesting ... Andrew confesses he blogs naked. ... Sullivan insults Kurt, making fun of how Kurt's baby, Inside.com, is now in the crapper. ... then,Kurt begins by pretending he can't smell the insult dumpA.S. just took on Kurt's head. ... then he kisses Andrew's rear.... after that, Kurt confesses he, too, also wants to have sex with Moby. ... Kurt closes by saying that all blogs are dumb and that he doesn't have time for them anyway.She catches the flavor and absurdity of the dialogue to a tee.
categories: salonika memewatch metablog
8:04:37 AM say what []
