Category: Burningbird

Categories
Weblogging Writing

Wincing words

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

There are certain words and phrases popular among webloggers that I’ve grown to dislike over time. Well some I disliked from the start; others I’ve come to dislike only after many repetitions. Whether people continue to use these phrases or not, I don’t care–to each their own. But if we are ever to meet someday and you use one of these words and I wince, you’ll at least know it’s because of the word, not your bad breath or the spinach stuck in your teeth.

The first is blogosphere. What kind of word is blogosphere? Haven’t we done enough damage with ‘blog’ that we have to tag on ‘osphere’?

To me, blogosphere implies that those who weblog live within a bubble isolated from the rest of the known universe. Every time I hear the term, I get a mental image of a huge beach ball floating on the water at the beach: drifting without purpose and soon to be lost. Except that in my visualization, there are millions of tiny little faces looking out at me from within the ball.

Brrrr! Gives me the cauld grue.

If we sail, do we use sailosphere? If we volunteer to help at the library, do we use the term bookosphere in reference to our activities in this environment? Why, then, blogosphere?

The second word isn’t a word, it’s an acronym: MSM. In case you don’t know the term–and goodness sake, how can you not know this term, it litters our pages like candy-shelled chocolate spilled from a bag–it means mainstream media.

First, what is MSM? Seemingly it has to do with professional journalism, but I look around at the people who use it, disparagingly, and notice that many of them are professional journalists–a contradiction leaving me going, “Well, huh.” Do we differentiate between us and this MSM by whether we get paid or not for our efforts? If I remember correctly, some of the more popular webloggers make a great deal of money from their weblogs.

If MSM is specifically professional journalism done by people who don’t blog, do we include all forms of journalism in this classification? If so, then if a newspaper gets a blog, does it stop being MSM? Or is it now, MSM…but with a blog?

How about movies? Are these MSM? They are media. They are main stream. Since most people who use the term MSM do so with a sneer, we have to assume that the ultimate hope is to replace this MSM. Are we saying that today there are podcasts to replace radio; tomorrow there will be vidcasts to replace movies? Look out Tom Cruise, move aside Cameron Diaz: here comes Adam Curry and Dave Winer starring in that blogosphere favorite, “The Odd Couple”?

It’s an Us and Them word, and Us and Them words never lead to anything useful. Besides, every time I hear MSM, I get hungry for Chinese food.

Blogosphere makes me wince, MSM gives me gas, but the phrase I dislike most of all is citizen journalist. I’ll apologize upfront to all of you who love this phrase, but I think it’s the most pretentious piece of twaddle to ever spill out of our brains.

If we’re citizen journalists, does this mean that the reporters down at my local paper aren’t citizens? Do I need to call the Department of Homeland Security on them? Could be fun, true; but I think I’ll pass.

Additionally, how is having a weblog so different from a ‘journalistic’ perspective that we need to have such specialized terms? After all, in this country at least, there’s long been a tradition of personal publications: flyers, underground newspapers, letters exchanged between a network of writers, even Joe the Wacko giving out his mimeographed opinions, printed on bright pink paper. A weblog is just medium, really. Less finger cramping than writing; not as pretty, though, as the bright pink mimeographed sheets.

Some would say that this form of journalism is different, because weblogging gives us a much broader audience. As to this, anyone with a box and a street corner can broadcast. Writing a letter to an editor is broadcasting. Joe the Wacko standing out in front of City Hall is broadcasting. It’s the will to have an opinion and make it heard that’s essential to broadcasting. And who is to say which broadcasting approach has more and lasting influence?

Listen to the phrase, too: citizen journalist. It’s a spooky phrase, and should make your spine tingle in warning. Replace ‘journalist’ with ‘copjustice’ and you have vigilantes; replace ‘citizen’ with ‘patriot’ and you have fascism. Replace both with ‘weblogger’, and you have me.

Categories
Writing

The words we use

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Robert Scoble changes his opinion about the China/MSN Spaces issue, and decides since his wife, son, best friend, Dan Gillmor, Rebecca MacKinnon, and several Chinese webloggers say he’s wrong, he must be wrong.

I don’t know why this irritated me so much, but it has. Perhaps it’s the idea that opinions have a critical mass, and once it’s reached, the opinion must be ‘wrong’. Maybe its because all the people congratulating Scoble on being ‘man’ enough to admit his mistake are doing so because he now supports their viewpoint.

Regardless, it’s nice to be an environment where there are no restrictions on the words we use when we write. That is, after all, the essence of being free to speak: the words we use.

Categories
Just Shelley

Kicking funk

Today’s a really nice day–warm, but with a cool breeze and low humidity. The clouds are nice, fat, and fluffy white, against a dark blue sky and people smile at you without you even having to ask for it; even the birds seem to be singing more. This is good because I’ve been in a funk lately, and just haven’t been feeling up to challenging trails (or even sidewalks).

The run of good weather will last through the weekend, so this will probably be my last post for a few days, as I am turning this titanium dominatrix off and spending time outside. In the outdoors. Away from computer. Away from my cellphone. Maybe even away from the camera, though I’m not sure I know how to walk without the camera bag on my back.

First though I had errands to run. I got my hair cut by Ramona, who did a really great job. It’s now a mass of short, wavy curls, with a flirty little flip at the bottom. I feel so hip and fun–not bad for one of those inexpensive walk-in places. Not bad for an older woman with the funk.

Then it was to Petsmart to pick up grass to give to my chlorophyll-junkie cat, and to spend time petting and patting the pups that people bring in. Today, one of the women who works at the store had her 12-week old west highland terrier puppy with her, and that little sweetie just stole my heart.

After extended puppy therapy, I stopped by the market and picked up fresh fruit: bananas, white nectarines, pluots (plum-apricot hybrid), and cherries. The cherries are really nice firm, dark bings–sweet and juicy. And the rest of the fruit seems equally luscious, though it cost an outrageous amount of money. It’s not easy or cheap to eat healthy, but I felt needed the fresh produce, for medicinal reasons.

I also picked up some homemade spinach fettuccine noodles, as well as some unusual new small, but larger than cherry-sized tomatoes, artichokes in seasoned oil, black olives, garlic, onion, cream, and cheese to make a vegetarian Alfredo. It’s simple — just cut the tomatoes and olives up into the artichoke oil to marinade for a time (then drain), cook the sauce (with the garlic and onion) and the noodles and then toss all of together . That’s it — no salad, no bread. And fresh fruit and sorbet for desert.

If this doesn’t kick the funk, nothing will.

Coming back, I passed an intersection where firemen will hold their boots out to collect for charities, and one of the local churches collects for its mission downtown. Today, though, a young man was standing on it, holding up a sign that read, simply, “Down on my luck”. Just standing there, stiff backed, holding that sign. Not approaching the cars, or extending containers to the drivers. Just standing there, looking straight ahead.

I guess it goes to show that no matter how put upon you’re feeling, someone else has it worse. If the sight of him didn’t kick me in the funk, it definitely kicked me in the butt.

Life is good. I have fresh cherries to eat, so life is good.

Categories
Web Writing

Dusting off the poet

It’s been a long time since I’ve indulged in any poetry at the site. Been a long time since I’ve haunted poets.org to look for just the right verse to suit a picture or a mood.

This week, I oiled my inner poet and set it on its creaky way only to find out that poets.org has undergone a rather significant reorganization. Faced with ‘new’ and wondering if there was anything in there for the inner geek as well as the inner poet, I explored about.

One new feature, or at least, new to me, is many of the poems now is have a topic association. For instance, if a poem is related to aging, other poems related to this topic are listed in the sidebar. This goes beyond groupings of poem by poet, period, and era. It definitely goes beyond keyword searches. It’s given me much thought, and new ideas, in my own continuing search for the case-insensitive semantic web.

The site also has a listening booth, though perhaps it already had this and I didn’t notice. Anyway, the listening book contains readings by poets and readings about poets, including my favorite Dylan Thomas.

Having satisfied the geek, at least for the moment, I returned to the poet, though poet is inaccurate and even a conceit, because I can barely walk and talk at the same time, much less rhyme. If, though, code is poetry, then I wield a mean curly bracket with the best of them. As for loops, you should see me loop–sexiest thing since fishnet stockings.

Returning to my poet, I accessed the improved search engine and searched on the keyword “words”; finding not one but two really great poems from contemporary poets among those returned. Since I’ve been remiss in letting my inner poet out for a walk, I’ll publish both.

Sorry, no photos to accompany the works. The weather continues in the 90s and heavily humid, and I have had no desire to sweat and puddle my way through new venues (though I must break out of my cave tomorrow morning before I bite the cat from cabin fever).

A Quick One Before I Go by David Lehman

There comes a time in every man’s life

when he thinks: I have never had a single

original thought in my life

including this one & therefore I shall

eliminate all ideas from my poems

which shall consist of cats, rice, rain

baseball cards, fire escapes, hanging plants

red brick houses where I shall give up booze

and organized religion even if it means

despair is a logical possibility that can’t

be disproved I shall concentrate on the five

senses and what they half perceive and half

create, the green street signs with white

letters on them the body next to mine

asleep while I think these thoughts

that I want to eliminate like nostalgia

0 was there ever a man who felt as I do

like a pronoun out of step with all the other

floating signifiers no things but in words

an orange T-shirt a lime green awning

How can you not love a poem that has a line like o was there ever a man who felt as I do like a pronoun out of step with all the other floating signifiers? This poem should be required reading for everyone who has found the truth. Then it should be required for everyone who thinks they have lost it.

All She Wrote by Harryette Mullen

Forgive me, I’m no good at this. I can’t write back. I never read your letter.

I can’t say I got your note. I haven’t had the strength to open the envelope.

The mail stacks up by the door. Your hand’s illegible. Your postcards were

defaced. Wash your wet hair? Any document you meant to send has yet to

reach me. The untied parcel service never delivered. I regret to say I’m

unable to reply to your unexpressed desires. I didn’t get the book you sent.

By the way, my computer was stolen. Now I’m unable to process words. I

suffer from aphasia. I’ve just returned from Kenya and Korea. Didn’t you

get a card from me yet? What can I tell you? I forgot what I was going to

say. I still can’t find a pen that works and then I broke my pencil. You know

how scarce paper is these days. I admit I haven’t been recycling. I never

have time to read the Times. I’m out of shopping bags to put the old news

in. I didn’t get to the market. I meant to clip the coupons. I haven’t read

the mail yet. I can’t get out the door to work, so I called in sick. I went to

bed with writer’s cramp. If I couldn’t get back to writing, I thought I’d catch

up on my reading. Then Oprah came on with a fabulous author plugging

her best selling book.

Another brilliant line and somewhat, oddly sad: I regret to say I’m unable to reply to your unexpressed desires. But now I have a highly original way of apologizing for unanswered email. What is your excuse?

Categories
Burningbird

Making do

As you may have noticed, I’ve re-designed my site. Again. Compared to the flames, the look is actually rather conservative, although I prefer to think of it as subtle.

While working on a client’s site this week, I noticed that after staring at her pages for a time, my own site seemed, in comparison, very harsh on the eyes. Eventually it got to the point where I would squint when I accessed the weblog. I don’t know if this effect is peculiar to me, but I didn’t like the fact that I might be causing people to half close their eyes when looking at my pages. I hope to generate reactions with my web site, but I don’t want ‘pain’ to be among them.

Now, with the soft greens, blues, and plums, though the design may not make you jump up and down with excitement, and it lacks some of the modern/with-it/hip flourishes, at least it doesn’t make you squint.

Issues of visual overstimulation aside, there is another reason I changed the site design: the purple pixel effect.

I’ve written before about the purple (magenta) pixel that runs down my monitor in my TiBook. Its cause is the continuous opening and closing of the lid, leading to wear in the connections between the video card and the display. Luckily, unlike others, I’ve only had the one line so far, but it is rather prominently situated about 1/4 of the way in from the left side.

For the most part, I’ve been able to compensate for the purple pixel. I’ve even learned to make use of it–it makes a great straight edge when aligning documentation in code and blocks of CSS in my stylesheets. Still, there are times when the purple pixel adds a distracting element and accessing my pages was one of those. The magenta clashed, horribly, with the flame design–really nasty.

With the new look, the purple pixel provides a bit of dash and color when I align the browser window so that the line fits just so over the break between the lighter green and the darker green in the left frame of the content window. Since you can’t see this, I captured part of the screen and then used PhotoShop to create a 1-pixel line the same color in the image–using my one-pixel screen aberration to accurately draw the line.