Cory Doctorow on blogging

“Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.”

[via Halley’s Comment]

Emily Nussbaum on teen blogging

“…a generation of compulsive self-chroniclers, a fleet of juvenile Marcel Prousts gone wild. When he meets new friends in real life, M. offers them access to his online world. ”That’s how you introduce yourself,” he said. ”It’s like, here’s my cellphone number, my e-mail, my screen name, oh, and — here’s my LiveJournal. Personally, I’d go to that person’s LJ before I’d call them or e-mail them or contact them on AIM” — AOL Instant Messenger — ”because I would know them better that way.”

— Emily Nussbaum[via Dave Winer]

Doc Searls describes blogs

“… linky journals. What matters most about them is not where anybody falls on the power curve, but that every writer inhabits a place where anybody can write anything about anything, with a good chance that, if it’s interesting, others will find it, remark upon it, and use it to scaffold a shared understanding of whatever-it-is, and then some.”

Sounds where there should be none (Nikol Lohr)

“That sound in the wall was not good. That was no skittering mousy or even gallopy rat sound. That was something altogether different. Suddenly the vent that mysteriously bent open a while back seemed terribly ominous. I immediately ran and got several drywall screws and screwed it shut all cockeyed and cartoonishly like a crazy person.”

— From Nikol Lohr’s The Disgruntled Housewife