Categories
Connecting

Confidences

I’ve just returned from a hike that was harder than anticipated, though incredible for all of that. Unfortunately, when I turned on my computer to upload photos, I received several emails, all related to an email I had sent out earlier to Marc Canter and three other people.

An email where Canter completely discounted what I wrote in favor of someone who was ‘higher profile’ who had responded to it. An email that was forwarded on to several other people, and used to create a ‘backchannel email list’. An email that was ended with:

By the way, this is NOT for publication in your weblog. Or distribution outside of this tiny group.

I guess that within certain weblogging circles, and with certain webloggers, confidences are not respected. It’s my fault, though; I should have known better than to expect courtesty or confidentiality from Marc Canter, because all Marc Canter respects is Marc Canter.

What did surprise me was that no one else on this list took Marc to task, or even felt there was anything wrong with it. What the f**k is wrong with webloggers now?

The word ‘respect’ is being bandied about, primarily because of money and this whole ‘blogging for dollars’ crap. But respect is more than just money — it’s also how you treat people.

(By the way, if someone pays me to write about my hikes, that’s being paid to weblog; anything else is nothing more than product endorsement. We pride ourselves on our honesty, as compared to “Big Media”; yet in this first genuine test of blogging commercialization, we won’t even call an endorsement, an endorsement. )

Categories
Books History

One hundred trails

I had a successful venture at the library last week and came home with several very good books. One is Birth of a Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom, which I found to be a very entertaining book and plan on writing more about later.

I also found a book on the Korean “comfort women”, women held as sex slaves by the Japanese in World War II. It’s titled Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaeves of the Japanese Military, and features nothing more than each woman’s account of her experiences. It’s a compelling, though oddly unemotional book — stark, and made more so by the photographs of the women included with each woman’s testimony.

A third book was The Hungry Ocean by Linda Greenlaw, the female swordfish captain featured in the movie The Perfect Storm. This is an interesting story about life on a swordfishing boat, but for some reason her writing just hasn’t grabbed me that much and I’m not sure I’ll finish the book.

The last book was a lucky find, One Hundred Nature Walks in the Missouri Ozarks. This book details several new hiking areas I wasn’t familiar with from my other books. And since today is the first nice day we’ve had in almost a week, I think I’ll take a break from this computer and my work on the commerce site and weblogging, and go for a walk. Maybe I’ll be lucky and find a photo or two.