Thanks to RevCow, I procrastinated for ten minutes reading an interview with Heather Havrilesky in the L.A. Weekly. She sounds remarkably sensible and I bet her novel will rock. Here is her take on viewing blogging as a trend:
I think the popularity of blogging has grown an incredible amount, so there'll be articles saying it's the next big thing, and then there'll be a backlash and its popularity will shrink and instead of saying, "Oh, you have a blog? That's cool," people will say, "Oh my god, you've got a blog? That's so 2001 of you." Everything gets blown out of proportion and then summed up as a stupid trend in the end. Popularity should never be taken too seriously — the good writing and good art that come out of any given movement is all that anyone focuses on over the long haul.Heather is harder on herself on her rabbit blog:
But, man, do I come across as a humorless fuck, or what? So self-serious and sullen.
categories: metablog
3:27:46 PM 
say what []
Cracking down on a thing just makes it more desirable. How many readers would have have slogged through Ulysses if it hadn't have been banned as obscene? It looks like BEACHtechie is getting his day in the sun, following the school suspension re-reported here earlier. ("Yesterday I had more unique visitors to my blog than any other day, ever. Thanks to everyone.")
A few things from his blog struck me. The first is funny:
They don't know what the hell a blog is, they kept on calling it a "b-log" ...The second is serious:
You know I write my heart and soul into this thing. I guarantee you this has helped me in english class ... maybe not directly, but I have gained so much knowledge from reading and writing. It's made me more emotional, more open, more knowledgeable.The last disturbs me:
I had to write this affidavit telling them everything I knew about my blog, how long I had been posting from school, who else from my school had a blog and everything.(Emphasis added.) Maybe it's been too long since I was in high school, but is that kind of snitchmongering typical?
Anyway, it's good to know you can study web development and Oracle in high school these days. Before long I'll be supersizing this guy's order.
categories: memewatch metablog
1:37:06 PM say what []
Glenn Fleishman follows up on J.D.'s partial transcipt of the Berkeley panel:
One of the points that I come away with from this discussion is that the real crux of the difference between journalism and personal blogging is a very fine amount of intermediation. Instead of the heavy intermediation that happens between a newspaper journalist writing and the account that appears in the newspapers, blogging journalism involves fewer people and fewer changes.He also makes this observation:
For freelancers, a blog like mine, on a focused topic, can truly change your career.
categories: metablog
11:25:06 AM say what []
There's always procrastination, and on any given day if I get my quota of work done, I may be eager to post to a blog. In the course of my workday as well if I encounter interesting stuff I'll probably stow it for blogging later, although that goes against much of what makes me like the weblog form so much: the immediacy, the capture, the end to stockpiling.
categories: x-pollen
10:17:38 AM say what []
Metafilter is all over the "blogger expelled from school" story. Quoting Danelope:
This is all due to every paranoid school administrator's fear that their school will be the next Columbine. Harris and Klebold had a Web site where they posted their hate-filled screeds against, well, just about everything, and as a result, any site the administrators discover is scoured for clues into what they see as a potential-future-mass-murderer's twisted mind.
From his weblog: Remember that entry the other day when I said "UPDATE: fjdsfjdslkfjklsdjf" (a bunch of letters)? Well, one of the people at the school thinks it's "secret code"...what in the hell? hahahahaha.
I can't argue with the school's position that the kid shouldn't be blogging from class — even though everyone in every school, including the teachers and admins, uses school machines for non-school-related activities — but their threats of expulsion are wholly indefensible (and, if the rest of his story is true, little more than intimidation tactics.)
The student's blog appears to be down today.
Looks like I'm trickling memes down and not up today.
At some point I need to think and write about linking to higher-profile sites. On the one hand, what's the point? Does anyone ever need to point to Mefi, Dave Mark, RCB, etc.?
On the other hand, it seems weird to avoid linking to popular sites and you can still assume that you may have readers who don't read all the most popular blogs and news sites, or you can take a completist attitude toward the material, trying to make your own archive as useful as possible.
As with most such things, I probably wiggle through the middle between extremes. I feel less compelled to link to a popular site unless the source material is a strong fit for the purpose of this blog. Then when I do I want to give via credit.
Lastly, it's a two-way web and there's something to be said to sending traffic to anyone (and showing up in their referrer logs), regardless of whether it's just more "rain on the ocean" (quotation courtesy of new father Scot Hacker—congratulations, Scot!—from a slightly different context).
These same issues apply to blogrolling, only moreso.
categories: metablog
9:41:44 AM say what []
(via Scripting News) Dive into Mark has developed an RSS 2.0 template for Movable Type.
Besides demonstrating how to implement RSS 2.0 feeds, it also takes some steps towards showing how namespace innovations derived for RSS 1.0 can be utilized in this (other fork) version of the "standard" (can we still call it that?).
categories: metablog
9:01:39 AM say what []
