Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
My nephew’s graduation was today but I decided not to drive over to it. This last week was a long week, capped off with my roommate receiving some very difficult news last night. It will be a quiet weekend this weekend, which suits me. Perhaps I’ll get out for some photography tomorrow.
I received a surprised chuckle when reading AKMA’s coverage of the Digital Genres conference, and saw the following:
Trevor characterizes blogs as stories, whether in pictures (he cites Burningbird and Rageboy, an unnerving combination) or words.
Now, contrary to popular myth, I am not Rageboy in drag — his eyes are blue, mine are green, and he’s really much prettier than I am.
The Corante Social Software weblog folks — Clay Shirky. Liz Lawley, Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet, Jessica Hammer, and Hylton Jolliffe — have kindly asked me to guest weblog this next week. I was both touched and honored by this request, and have planned a series of posts about the social aspect of social software — what happens when you throw cruddy old human behavior at shiny new social technology. Hopefully the social software folks won’t regret their invitation.
Out and about, I saw that Andrew Orlowski from The Register does seem to dislike webloggers from his recent article. He writes:
Well, primarily because blogging is a solitary activity that requires the blogger to spend less time reading a book, taking the dog for the walk, meeting friends in the pub, seeing a movie, or reading to the kids. The reason that 99.93 per cent of the world doesn’t blog, and never will, is because people make simple information choices in what they choose to ingest and produce, and most of this will be either personal and private, or truly social. Blog-evangelists can fulminate at the injustice of this all they like, but people are pretty smart and make fairly rational choices on the information they process.
Interesting people run interesting blogs, but it’s remarkable how few of them there are.
I’m not sure how big weblogging will be. I had recent exposure to the fact that most people really don’t have an interest in maintaining a journal, online or off. Most people really don’t care for writing that much, or even have that much respect for it. I am finding that even something like writing a technical book can lose technical brownie points rather than increase them.
Having said this, though, I do find that there are people who want to connect and communicate, and who like the idea of a weblog or a wiki, and usually have something to share — whether it’s an interest in books, poetry, movies, music, photography, travel, technology, and yes, even everyday life. And I have grown from this exposure, though sometimes the growth isn’t without growing pains.
I have to laugh at Mr. Orlowski’s statement about weblogger’s spending less time reading books, because my exposure to poetry and literature, cultures and new technologies, and interesting people has doubled since I started this weblog.
I still get a kick out of being called a ‘poetry’ weblog, when my interest in poetry arose from works such as Loren’s recent writing about William Carlos Williams. I found through Loren’s discussion with Language Hat that I also favor the ‘romantics’ among the poets — and now I actually understand what this means, rather than being a memorized term I can pull out to impress people. Too bad Mr. Orlowski spends so much time with the weblogging A-List folks such as Dave Winer and Polish teenage girls, rather than the people I read daily — he might be pleasantly surprised.
As for the socialization — that’s also a chuckle as I read in weblog post after weblog post of people attending this conference or that get together. I think I’m the only person who hasn’t met other webloggers in person and that’s primarily by choice, being the reticent, quiet, and shy person that I am.