Being off-weblog this weekend, I missed the Blogathon, and in particular, the joint effort on the part of Scott Andrew LePera and Shannon Campbell to co-write a song in 24 hours. All online.
They made their goal, plus one: two songs, Southdown and Nothing New. (Mirrored on Burningbird Net)
Their effort was extraordinary. The music is wonderous. How they did this is amazing. I hope that Scott and Shannon combine their talent more often, because they make lovely music together. Though this note is late for the Blogathon, hopefully you can still contribute to Mr. Holland’s Opus in their name.
In additional news, Elaine aka Kalilily was featured in a new Chicago Tribute article on women and weblogging.
(Note, registration required for article.)
All in all, the article was one of the better ones, with a few caveats. I winced when I read Rebecca Blood’s comment categorizing weblogs into “filter-style blogs or short-form journals”, as well as the article’s references towards gender-based weblogging:
Men tend to use the filter format for their often political Weblogs, whereas women lean toward journals about “day-to-day stuff,” or traditionally female topics such as cooking, knitting or motherhood, Blood said.
Ouch – gender stereotypes are alive and well and living in blogdom. For being such an open minded person, Rebecca can be suprisingly conservative in weblogging classification, ethics, and normative behavior. I like the point that she made on clustering, though:
However, blogging can have a downside Blood calls a “clustering effect,” where people only link to like-minded sites, creating “an echo chamber.”
“That’s not a good thing,” she said. “We need to talk to each other and understand each other in a democracy.”
Spot on.
I also liked what Elaine had to say:
“From politics to partying, from men to menopause, from feminism to family–women Webloggers seem more comfortable in viewing their personal lives in a larger, cultural context and also in looking at global issues from a very personal point of view,” she wrote in an e-mail.
In fact, there was much about this article that was refreshing, not the least of which was hearing from more ‘just plain blogging folks’. Who just happen to be women.
