Category: Weblogging

Weblogging is the world’s greatest novel, written by me and about 10,000 of my closest friends.

Mike Sanders opened up a discussion about blogging communities today, which happened to fit perfectly with some thoughts that have been kicking around in my tired brain.

He mentioned the A-list bloggers and defined them as a community. I agree with Mike on A-list, but not community — community requires interaction and Cam and Meg and others of the A-listers seem to me to be strongly singular in their voices. In particular I see Cam as a man who is proud of being the lone wolf of weblogging.

I am part of a specific community of webloggers who I’ve come to know and admire. They are my friends as much as fellow bloggers. Unlike the A-listers, our weblogs take on the aspects of cooperative writing, with one person starting a conversation and others adding to it, within comments, weblog postings, or both. The effect can be profound, rich, and rewarding; a feedback loop that can send you at dizzying speeds throughout a loop of interconnected nodes.

In Mike’s posting he quoted a snippet from an email that Jonathon wrote:

I love this group. Being a member is one of best outcomes that flowed from starting my blog. I’m not sure how I became a member and I don’t know who all the members are. That’s very important to me. The amorphous quality of the group. It may well be that if you sat us all down in separate rooms and asked us to list the members, we would each come up with radically different lists. That makes it incredibly beautiful and special — because it means there are no barriers to entry and no possible sense of exclusivity.

Jonathon speaks for me with this paragraph as much as he speaks for himself — beautifully done.

Lately, though, I’m finding that, as with any new colony, the frenzy of early formation is now gradually giving away to a calmer and more mature community, attracting newer, vital voices just as the more mature members are becoming quieter — more thoughtful in our postings, perhaps posting more infrequently.

This quietness isn’t because of lack of interest in our weblogging community; it’s because the community is mature enough that we don’t have to post all the time — we’ll still be here when each of us has something to say, in our own time, and in our own way.

Poor Mike. I imagine he didn’t know what he started today with his posting on community, especially his reference to the A-List and MetaFilter.

As expected the MeFi gang picked up on the posting. This is a good thread to follow, with many good points.

There was also some similarity to the kite and the fickle wind described in one of my previous postings, in that Mike was picked up and slammed to the ground again and again. However, this is also a MeFi trait at times when the beast is irked — no offense to MeFi folks in the crowd.

I did some pick up of my own about “community” in my previous posting, and I find that this community thing can be “you there and me here”, and never the two shall meet at times. I would like to think that this weblog is good for a general audience, but I know that I’ve fallen into insider speak more than once. Still — this is my weblog, and I can use insider speak if I want to, can’t I?

(However, I am not happy about my previous posting aside from the reference to Jonathon’s email note, which was excellent. I won’t pull the posting, but ignore it and go to the “don’t post about your co-workers, your boss, your illicit love affair, and your drug use in your weblog” posting that preceded it.)

On to other things — I took some sunset photos of interesting places along the Embarcadero by my place. I thought I would post a few for your edification. One of the photos is of Pier 23, a biker bar that plays reggae and jazz, and which wouldn’t serve me yesterday. Maybe the place is run by MeFi and they knew I was a weblogger?

The Bloggers with Attitude webring now has 15 members, and growing. An interesting, eclectic group of folks, too!

The newest member is Sharon Campbell of Pet Rock Star. Loved her weblog slogan: Voice of an Angel, Mouth of a Truckdriver

Among the postings at her weblog I found (stealing liberally) the following:

Wrestlers in Minnesota tried to – once again – get girls banned from the sport by showing off a move called the high crotch takedown.

I don’t know what they’re so concerned about. All mothers teach their daughters the high crotch takedown before they’re allowed to date.

This has been a spooky day of independent but bizarrely related weblog postings. At least, I see them as related.

I’ve been having a discussion with Jonathon in the comments related to a posting of his about criticism and how this is a necessary aspect of weblogging. Of criticism, he states:

I’d like to see it more more widely practiced. I shy away from criticizing other bloggers — because I like the people who write the blogs I read regularly and I’m reluctant to offend even virtual friends. I wish I were more courageous. Blogging is diminished by the tame cameraderie that Dvorak condemns.

Jonathon has an extremely valid point. If we don’t feel comfortable criticizing, or perhaps questioning, each other than we are all going to be deadly dull, very quickly.

Still, regardless of how skilled you are, how soft the application, how benign the intent, don’t kid yourself — if you criticize a person’s content in a weblog, whether it be the writing, an opinion, or the look, it’s personal. Yes, criticism is important, and weblogging will be nothing more than murky grays without it, but it’s still personal.

The saving grace is that the positive effects of the criticism can offset the negative if the criticism arises from and flows through our respect for each other.

I then found a little cross-blog conversation going on between Dane Carlson, Bill Simoni, and then back to Dane about the importance of accurate spelling and grammar usage in blogging.

I am in agreement with Dane when he says:

Bill, I don’t mean to imply that you should leave spelling, grammar and style out of your posts; just that your readers, on a whole, will not object to finding a occasional misspelled word.

Of course, we all know that I am the Queen of creative grammar and spelling, so I don’t think anyone’s surprised that I would agree with Dane. Bill has some equally valid points, but I still agree with Dane. Perhaps we should focus on the thought, rather than the medium.

Finally, this evening, I read the following within a posting at Karl’s:

Sometimes – out here – I realize that I don’t have the background to stand up to intellectual discussion.

He later wrote:

The need to scream – I’m one of you – tugs at me. I fall for it sometimes. And then reality sets back in.

It seems that Mr. Dvorak isn’t too happy with webloggers, or with the Cluetrain folks, whom he seems to have intertwined into a blogging hydra, composed of equal parts of both.

I was going to respond to this, and I expect that you all expected me to respond to something like this. I was ready to post a passionate response, burning with the heat of a thousand cold blue white suns. After all, I’m Burningbird and this is nothing less than what you’ve come to expect. Right?

However, after reading several postings throughout weblogging today, I find that I have neither the energy nor the inclination to say more about my opinion of Mr. Dvorak and his pieces on weblogging. Trying to shoot at his arguments is equivalent to trying to shoot bullets at an armor built of steel-plated arrogance — nothing could possibly get through, so why try?

Others less passionate, more reasonable, calmer and more influential have something to say on Dvorak — I suggest you read   them, instead.