Category: Weblogging

The buzz is all about the NY Times article, A Rift between the Bloggers.

Dave seems to be happy about it because the article called webloggers journalists. He would like to see complete transcripts of the interviews, though. (Sorry, Dave. If you’re a journalist then you understand that journalists don’t release unquoted interview material.)

Glen Reynolds thinks the piece was fair, and Doc says we (webloggers) are out of control.

File 13’s Amish Tech Support (sorry, that is the name of the weblog) thinks the article was a plug for the upcoming book “We Blog: Publishing online with Weblogs”. As a writer for a rival book, I wasn’t overly thrilled myself that only the one book was mentioned. After all, we also had Big Dogs among our authors. (Not me, I’m only a Pup.)

PhotoDude goes on to say that the article author, David Gallagher, is a weblogger himself, a photoblogger. Those two weblogs were a pleasant discovery – always looking for new photoblogs.

Rifts among bloggers. Sure. There’s rifts all the time. I don’t get care for certain bloggers and have criticized what they write. Certain bloggers don’t care for me, and criticize what I write. Life goes on.

To me this article is nothing more than Big Dogs talking about other Big Dogs, and, frankly, the whole thing is getting boring.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I tried an experiment yesterday: I organized my blogroll into different categories of webloggers, such as Really Scary Smart People, Huggables, Life Twisters, and so on.

The intention was to have a bit of fun, and also to hopefully encourage weblog readers into visiting these weblogs. One of the problems with blogrolls is that they’re so uniform and so common we tend to ignore them. By categorizing my blogroll friends, I had hoped to make them all stand out a bit.

What I forgot with this little brain storm of mine is that categorizing a person is probably one of the most depersonalizing things you can do to another human being. My putting an individual in a category said to that person, this is how I view you. I told them, “Forget the richness of your voice, the strength of your personality, the warmth of your humor, and my regard, and yes even love for you. You are (pick one: a/b/c/…).”

I took each of my friends and flattened them into a cookie-cutter category, and then walked away dusting hands off, pleased at my own cleverness. There are times when the Bird screws the pooch, and this was surely one of those times.

AKMA’s been talking about identity lately. In particular, he wrote the following:

One of the complicating elements in our discussion of identity comes from our tendency to take the partial information we have about someone’s identity as sufficient to envision his or her full identity.

Yesterday, I took one characteristic of each person and used this to form a basis for insertion into one category or another. By doing so I said to my weblog readers, “this weblogger is a Woman who Kicks Butt”. I set the stage for that reader so that when they go to Shannon’s weblog, they expect to see primarily a Woman who Kicks Butt. However, they may be shocked to see that the Woman who Kicks Butt is also a sensitive, accomplished and talented singer and songwriter, loyal friend, and highly complex and rich personality.

AKMA isn’t “just” a Huggable, Really Scary Smart person – he’s the one person who has broken through my deep distrust of Christians by showing that a Christian can have a sense of humor, can be tolerant, can love others regardless of their religious affiliation, and can have a deep moral integrity and loyalty that transcends any particular religious belief.

Chris isn’t just a Life Twister or Unique or Huggable – though all three are part of him. He’s an extremely caring person who believes strongly that we, as a people, can be better than how we see ourselves. When I think of him, I think of this person who wants to grab the world in a big bear hug, and then slap the world upside the head for all the idiotic things we do.

Sharon transcends Butt Kicker and Smart person and Artist, because she’s a mother and student and a very good friend who is going to be the world’s best librarian someday. Why? Because she has a deep love for books that goes beyond their material worth – to her words are gold, expressed thoughts diamonds.

I placed Jonathon into that old Australian Delegation classification, which removed any vestige of his personality, reducing him to nothing more than a citizen of a country. I disregarded the fact that when Jonathon writes about The Pillow Book or Tales of Genji, I want to curl up on the floor putting my head on my hands and just listen to the beauty of the words as they flow over and around me.

Dorothea is more than a Really Scary Smart Person or Woman who Kicks Butt. She wrote in the comments attached to the category posting:

There’s an interesting blog lurking in the experience, though, one AKMA might want to take a stab at. However much we try, we have limited control over how we are perceived by others. Our identities, if you will, are as dependent on the interpretation of others as is our writing on our readers.

 

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that BB’s genial attempt to lend us personality led to difficulties. How many of us are entirely comfortable with the idea that our identities are not under our sole control?

Dorothea is an astute observer of humanity, with an incredible knack for cutting to the heart of the matter. She is, by far, richer than any one entry in any one category.

I am a neophyte in this new brave new world where we connect to others through the threaded void, but I am learning. I am learning.

It’s amazing how much one can accomplish if one stops weblogging for a week.

I finally finished my writing for Unix Power Tools and am now in the editing and production stages. In addition, I’ve been working quietly in the background implementing some changes to the weblog. Note that those you see now aren’t the really interesting changes – I’ll be hitting some of you up to help me beta test these the first week of July.

I’ve started the usual pre-move activities: cancelling utilities, deciding what to keep, store, throw away. My philosophy is if I haven’t read it, worn it, or used it in two years, out it goes. That ought to take care of a lot of packing.

I don’t actually move until the 20th, and will be taking a roundabout two-week drive to get to St. Louis. If I can avoid getting et by grizzlies, I’ll post my adventures when I arrive. If I can’t avoid getting et by grizzlies, at least you’ll know I gave a bear somewhere a full meal deal.

‘Scuse me, do you want fries with that human?

I’ll be pulling my DSL connection this week, as soon as I receive some files related to a new contract I’m working on; most likely Tuesday if all goes as planned. That will end my posting – finally – as well as my unseemly, shady weblog lurking and quick hit and run commenting.

I wasn’t going to post until I got to St. Louis, but found that going cold turkey and not posting for an entire month was too much for me. Since I’m an addictive  personality, going without my weblogging fix that long was causing physical discomfort and aberrant behavior. For instance, joining friends for a going away dinner yesterday, I found myself nattering away about weblogging, completely disregarding glazed eyes and pitying looks.

Luckily, a group of students having dinner before going to the prom showed up – girls dressed in incredibly slinky, sophisticated cut down to here, up to there dresses – providing a useful distraction while I pulled myself together long enough to remember to hide my obsession from weblogging unbelievers.

There have been some interesting threads I’ve wanted to post on, in particular the Unified RSS thread at Ben Hammersley’s weblog, as well ongoing discussions about weblogger as warblogger as Journalist as savior of the world and defender of free press.

However, I’m following a new weblogging policy of “think first, write later” rather than indulging in my usual direct synaptic connection of brain to weblog to you. Because of this I’m holding on pursuing either thread in any depth until I reach St. Louis and can give both threads the time and attention they deserve.

I do want to say, though, that I’m pleased with Edd Dumbill’s comments in the RSS thread. As a fan of RDF as well as author of an upcoming RDF book, I’m concerned when I see folks ‘simplifying’ a specification in order to make it work with one particular implementation. As we found with HTML, this isn’t always the best course to follow.

The technology I will be adding to this weblog the first week of July is also based on RDF – something that couldn’t occur without the rich meta-language capability RDF provides, and the availability of libraries to work with same.

Personally, I think this technology is also going to blow the socks off of RSS/aggregation – but that’s only my opinion, of course.

As for the topic of weblogger as warblogger as Journalist as savior of the world and defender of free press – it can wait.

Scoble:

We’re getting a corporate bias in our news and we allowed it to get this way.

And people wonder why I read weblogs now. I think the news aggregator in Radio, and on OReilly, and other places is the most important new technology of the decade.

Do you use a news aggregator? Why not? Stop watching TV news. Stop reading your local newspaper. Get a news aggregator and tell a friend.

As more and more people use news aggregators the news business will be forced to change.

Stop watching TV news, and reading newspapers and we assume magazines and online sites for same. Instead, get a news aggregator. What does the news aggregator aggregate? News from the weblogs. Where do most of the weblogs get the news?

From local newspapers and TV news, magazines and sites for same.

If this was code, it would be an infinite recursion error.