Category: Weblogging

Categories
Political Weblogging

A gentle thank you

Sometimes things just don’t go the way you want. When I’m in a pissy mood, and need cheering up, I find myself going out to visit my favorite weblogs, looking for glimpses of humor, beautiful writing, and interesting and unique personal perspectives. And my favorites never fail me. A gentle thank you from me to you. In particular, I wanted to thank the following friends for their postings:

— Jerry posts another one of his wonderful photo essays this one on the New England mud season.

If you haven’t lived in rural New England, than you probably don’t understand why most country homes in the region have what they call a “mud room”. I found out the necessity of a mud room when I lived in Vermont for a year.

Hey Jerry — there’s a reason I moved to San Francisco 😉

— Shannon’s in an absolute manic writing mood, of which this posting,Shannon Campbell Meets Blair Witch, is just one example.

Shannon, I’m also terrified of spiders. When I lived in Seattle (I’ve moved around a lot, haven’t I?) we would get these spiders about the size of a tennis ball — and they were the small variety. I knew that the spiders (except for the Brown Recluse) were harmless, but I’d still run from the room when I spied them. Run quickly I might add.

Did you all know that Seattle and vicinity has more spiders per square meter than any other place on Earth? More interesing if useless facts: Folks in Seattle also eat more Hershey chocolate and read more books than any other place in the US.

I’m sure there’s no connection between any of these facts.

— On a more serious note, Mike Golby was forced to, yet again, defend himself from the label of “Anti-Semitic”. A weblog reader tells Mike the following in a comment attached to one of Mike’s posts:

    • Just a little feed-back from a sporadic reader. You do come off as anti-Semitic and especially anti-Meryl. I know neither of you, and I’m from the midwest of the US (read cornfields and Bible Belt) and I thought your post a month ago or so directed towards Meryl was heartless. I wanted to say something then, but didn’t, but here you go again, so I just thought I’d give you some disinterested feedback.

What a foolish comment. And what a thing to say to a person — hello, I don’t read you that often, but you seem Anti-Semitic to me. Anti-Meryl, too. However, I’m disinterested so don’t take it personally.

All together now folks: Airhead alert!

Mike took the reader’s comments personally; most people would. And he responded, accordingly, in a manner that was both eloquent and passionate.

Mike, I guess it’s my turn to ask if you’d like one lump or two with your tea?

Categories
Weblogging

Housecleaning

I’ve updated the Plutonian list to reflect the change in time due to Daylight Savings Time (pain in the butt). In addition, I also alphabetized the list.

Notice the new grouping titled “Recent Visitors”. This is a list of weblogs of people who have been kind enough to stop by, sit a spell, and leave a comment or two. Right now this list is maintained manually, once a week, but I’m in the process of writing a small application to pull weblog links from my comments and update this list automatically every night at midnight.

You wanna be on this list? Then you gots to do more than lurk. Hee Hee Hee.

I’m also playing around with Movable Type 2.0, which means yet another set of weblogging tool templates to master. BTW, I have the one, the only, the true Stavros the Wonder Chicken aka Empty Bottle to thank for help in me getting Movable Type setup. Chris — you da man.

Open Offer to Blogspot residents — this is an open invite to any Blogspot residents on my Plutonian list. I have room for a couple more weblogs on my server if you’re interested in making the move. You would get a weblog by the name of yourcurrentweblogname.burningbird.net, or you can have your own domain — though you’ll have to handle your own domain registration and name server entries.

Categories
Weblogging

Beg to differ

May I be the first to go online and say that I don’t give a shit about David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined?

I’m sure David’s probably the best thing next to vegemite to an Aussie and Marmite to a Brit and Peanut Butter to a yank — but I’m getting damn tired of hearing about the book, hearing about David, hearing about the whole friggen’ Cluetrain thing!

I’m almost at the point of tuning back into Dave Winer in order to hear more about Radio and OPML and stupid coffee mugs.

To all my readers who also have weblogs — I want to hear about you!!!

Categories
Weblogging

The Dizzy saga continues

I’ve been pestering and pestering Allan Moult to continue with his Dizzy series and today he posted a new entry.

Regardless of whether you like cats or not, you’re going to like these stories. Tasty sample from today’s posting:

I ended up in hospital for a tetanus shot, a bandage and a helluva lot of snickering from the nurses when confronted with the ‘fierce cat’ that attacked me.

Stories are accompanied by an excellent photo of Dizzy — probably one of the best cat photos I’ve seen.

Categories
Weblogging Writing

And the truth shall set you free

I suffered a bit of an eye opener today when I read Jonathon’s response to my weblog posting and follow up from yesterday regarding self-justification. He wrote:

Yet, even though I don’t regard Oblivio as a weblog, others might. I suppose it could be mistaken for a weblog, just as Michael Barrish could be mistaken for a real person. He probably is a real person since he also uses the website to solicit web development work (though he maintains separate sites for each purpose, for reasons he explains in the story Motherfucker ). But Barrish is also a character who appears in his own stories. As does Rachel, his girlfriend. Whether she really exists and whether she’s his girlfriend is impossible to determine, without knowing Michael Barrish. Even then, the real-life Rachel may bear only a fleeting resemblance to the Rachel in the stories. (Just like the women in some of my stories.)

Of all possible outcomes of yesterday’s writing, what I didn’t expect is that the story that originated my passion might be allegorical rather than experience. I am left wondering whether I am a sophisticated patron of the arts or an incredibly gullible fool. And that’s the inherent danger of mixing the art of creation within the context of experiential recounting.

Jonathon continues with:

So, you might be asking, what’s the point of all this? The point is this: there seems to be an implicit agreement amongst webloggers to speak with an authentic voice, to tell the truth as they see it, to give witness, according to the dictates of journalism.

…

Storytelling depends on a belief that an artfully constructed fiction is frequently more truthful than a carefully described fact.

Must all webloggers speak of true experiences? Not at all, as witness the excellent satire of Wealth Bondage or the historical recountings of Bloggus Caesari.

However, in my opinion, if webloggers establish a truthful context for their words, then they do have a pact with their readers that says, “React honestly to my story because what I tell you is true”.

Something to think about. And write more about later because now I am off to spend the rest of the day in the hallowed halls of Hippocrates.