I’d forgotten how much I like (and agree with) John C. Dvorak. He was one of the headliners at Gnomedex and poked some good natured fun at “the Blogging phenomenon.” (Note to self: Try to have something useful or interesting to say). Dan Gillmor was on the opposite end of the spectrum regarding the importance of blogs and gave some powerful examples.
Category Archives: Blogging
Corporate blogs
From an article by Hiawatha Bray in the Business Section (The Boston Globe) on the Weblogs Business Strategy conference last week:
“Consider: Every business needs to know what its employees know. Companies are crammed with experts on various topics whose knowledge goes to waste — because nobody knows what they know. Now give these workers an internal corporate blog, and encourage them to use it. Let them natter away on every topic that intrigues them. Harvest and index the results. You’ve mapped your workers’ brains. The company’s hidden experts will cheerfully reveal themselves, and the firm’s institutional memory gets an upgrade.” [By way of JOHO]
Blogging from Baghad?
I have no idea if this is the real deal. But if it is, well, it’s kind of amazing. Or maybe not. If it IS legit –and at least one person has done some research– it’s just such a good example of blogging.
“…half an hour ago the oil filled trenches were put on fire. First watching Al-jazeera they said that these were the places that got hit by bombs from an air raid a few miniutes earlier bit when I went up to the roof to take a look I saw that there were too many of them, we heard only three explosions. I took pictures of the nearest. My cousine came and told me he saw police cars standing by one and setting it on fire. Now you can see the columns of smoke all over the city.”
Assume for the sake of discussion this what it appears to be. No governments. No big news organizations. Just some guy in a city under attack, publishing his thoughts, feelings, whatever… to the entire world. The Internet has changed/is changing the world and blogging is an important part of that change.
Halley Suitt on writing and blogging
“And everything I ever learned about writing didn’t matter anymore. Everything I ever thought about writing went out the window as the breeze blew through my hair and the words poured out of me. I didn’t have to take writing seriously. I didn’t have to take words seriously. I didn’t have to sound like anyone else. I didn’t have to sound like The New Yorker — which weirdly, I sometimes sound like a little by NOT TRYING TO SOUND LIKE IT. So it showed me that I had a lot of hang-ups about writing and it showed me how to get over them fast. It showed me how to sound like myself. It gave me back my voice, which surprised people and surprised no one as much as it surprised me. Blogging was a place I could go and be me, completely, totally, unapologetically me. And if people didn’t like it, screw ’em. And I could write the hell out of the screen and if it blew up and disappeared, it didn’t matter anyway, because I could always come back and try something else again later. So despite all my inclinations towards bottles of ink and pads of paper, I started to blog and blog and blog and blog and there was no stopping me.”
From William Gibson’s blog
William Gibson has a blog. I’d like to know if having a website (and blog) was something his publisher pushed or if he was enthusiastic about the idea. One interesting (and discouraging) item from his bio:
“I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.”
Andrew Sullivan on blogging
“The one wonderful thing about blogging from your laptop is that you don’t have to deal with other people. You can broadcast alienated, disembodied, disassociated murmurings into a people-free void. You don’t have to run something past an editor, or frame your argument to an established group of subscribers. You just say what the hell you want.”
— Andrew Sullivan in Slate
Gnomedex: Conference blogging
I’ve been attending conventions, conferences and meetings of one sort or another for twenty-five years but this one is different. This one is wired. More to the point, it’s unwired. Many (most?) of the attendees have their notebook computers fired up and connected to the Internet via a wireless network. So, while the speakers were making their presentations, many of the people in the audience were “reporting” what was being said by posting (text and photos) to their personal blogs. Now, I don’t know if this is journalism or not. But I’m not sure it matters. Something is going on here. Steve Gibson is talking about Internet security and seconds later some guy in the audience hits the enter key and people all over the world can read about it (with photos). No networks. No editors. No filtering. How do we know that what we’re reading is accurate or fair? Well, there were probably a dozen people blogging today’s presentations. Pretty unlikely they’d all have the same ax to grind. Like I said… feels like something is happening here. [killed dead links in this post]
Blogging life.
If I were 22 years old and making regular blog entries, what would it look like thirty or forty years later. Almost 11,000 entries. Your life online. True, a lot of the shit we put in our blogs hardly seems worth the keystrokes. But the idea intrigues me.
I think my mom would have been up for a blog. She kept journals during the latter years of her life. I can see her sitting at the kitchen table, writing in her tiny, perfect longhand. When we asked what she was writing she’d say, “Oh, things that happened yesterday… things I’m thinking about.”
One more scary thing for today’s teenagers to deal with. Mom blogging away the intimate details of her 13 year old daughter’s life. “Hey, Amber. Did you see your mom’s blog today? She said she thought you were getting your first period.” Not good. As George Costanza told his mom, “You can’t be out there. I’m out there, so you can’t be out there.”
Moon over Kennett
My original idea for a blog was to persuade half a dozen of the more interesting people I know to jot down a few lines every week or so and I’d post them here. It required more organization than I could muster.
Last week I received an email from one of The Six that perfectly captures my original idea. My friend had taken a photograph he had to share. Now, you either get butt-crack humor or you do not. I would have guessed there were lots of websites dedicated to this phenomenon but a Google search didn’t reveal much.
For me the best part is the image of my friend coming out of his office, spotting the photo-op, racing back in to find and load his camera, then dashing back to the street to take the picture. That requires a… joie de vivre that’s very rare, in my experience.
As I thought about my original concept I became mildly depressed that I could only come up with six interesting friends. After receiving the butt-crack photo, I consider myself fortunate to know that many.