Simon McGarr: Salon Central

Goodbye?

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 15:36:32 GMT

Quiet isn't it? One of the oddities of this experiment has been watching my interest in writing for the blog form ebb and flow. Or rather flow and ebb. Suddenly, after the first rush of excitement it seems a little flat. Perhaps it would be best to listen to what my mother told me. If you've nothing to say, say nothing.

When streams become full blogs, whose blogs are they?

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 17:23:31 GMT

When streams become full blogs, whose blogs are they? So here's a question for you. As I mentioned previously, I am hoping to turn a channel of this blog into an editorial page for tuppenceworth.ie. If I get the time and teccy know-how together, I'll make that channel look like the rest of tuppenceworth's ugly but triumphantly functional design. I may even try hosting the blog from the tuppenceworth space (although we've definitely gone past my technical abilities now). But what would that mean for that stream's membership of the Salon blogs community. After all, they would still be postings from this Radio blog. They would be about nothing that the current random flashes that make up the content of my curate's egg blog now wouldn't include. So would tuppenceworth's editorial page be a part of Salon's blogs? Or by extension could all of tuppenceworth become a part of the community? Nothing on it would run contrary to the interests of the locals, as so far expressed. Except I think that it couldn't be thought of as part of the community. And the best reason I can give at the moment is that it faces another way. Which doesn't seem very cut and dried. But then I like the grey bits anyway.

The Problem with speaking to the Average...

Sat, 09 Nov 2002 00:20:20 GMT

The Problem with speaking to the Average... So I wrote rather nifty little essay yesterday, connecting the crummy US election results with the need of both the media and politics to appeal to an average of vastly different peoples. It had a discussion of niche parties and deftly brought in the fact that Ireland has the highest per capita newspaper consumption in the world. I slipped in the fact that we have three national dailies, a daily evening paper and innumerable local and special interest (sport, provos etc) newspapers. Each one caters for a slightly different market. As we only have 4.25 million or so people in the whole country, even the largest circulation papers would be seen as serving a tiny niche market in the US. Then, rather cleverly I thought, I drew a parallel with our range of political parties, with eight groupings represented in the Dail. This, coupled with our super-dooper voting system, means that people can really vote for someone (or a few someones) who represents what they think. All that remained was a quick contrast with the obvious problem with a two party system in such a vast place as the US. The politicians are unable to speak to any person directly for fear of offending their neighbour, just as no American newspaper editor can risk alienating a swath of readers by allowing too much individualism to creep into the articles. And then I was on the final lap and out the door. But I sent it through my mail-to-blog system. And somewhere along the way it was swallowed by web-imps. So you'll never know how good it was. Sorry about that.

Plans Afoot

Sat, 02 Nov 2002 22:18:21 GMT

Plans Afoot So I've been thinking of a big shift here at News from Elsewhere. I'm going to try to meld the blog here with tuppenceworth.ie. I'm not certain how it will work, or if I'll have the teccy know-how to do it (considering I have struggled to put in links) but I think an editorial blog might be a useful addition. But I'll also want to make this page fit the design of the others as well. Any suggestions or links to help would be gratefully recieved. I'm running an ibook, with Dreamweaver 3 and Radio on OS X