Say Everything
June 28th, 2009
Rafe Colburn has posted a couple of entries about Scott Rosenberg’s history of weblogging, Say Everything:
[Scott...] does a truly outstanding job of capturing the essence of events as they occurred. The toughest job for a historian or journalist is making the events recognizable to those who observed them closely, and Scott succeeds admirably on that front.
There are also pieces of analysis in the book that really impressed me. [...] He draws a distinction between “professional” bloggers and “traditional” bloggers that never occurred to me but that defines things perfectly – the pros write about what they think will interest their audience. The traditionalists write about what interests them. The difference is profound. I read all sorts of amateur blogs but very few professional ones. And what’s interesting to me is that the line is not whether the author gets paid or not – it’s the sensibility they bring to their work.
I’ll have to get a copy of Say Everything at some point. I’ll be interested to see how he tackles the question of what exactly makes a site a weblog.
As long-time readers may be aware, I’m finicky about this. Online journals aren’t weblogs, even if the author posts using WordPress or Movable Type. Personal sites that consist of a series of posts ordered chronologically but that don’t normally link to an external source aren’t weblogs, they’re opinion pieces.
There’s nothing wrong with either type of site, obviously – I read and enjoy plenty of both sorts – it’s just that IMNSHO they’re Not Weblogs. If the intent of the site’s author is to point out and/or comment upon material the author comes across on the internet, it’s a weblog,1 be it a linklog like LinkMachineGo or Bifurcated Rivets or a series of short essays on things the author has seen online or been thinking about like Rafe Colburn’s very own rc3.org or Amygdala.2
At any rate, that’s another title to go on my To Read pile some time soon…
__________- Obviously, a weblog author may occasionally find him or herself writing a link-free post, just as the author of a journal site may sometimes point their reader to an external site they’ve seen. The point is whether the usual intent of a site’s postings is to point visitors at material on other sites. ^
- But then, hackers aren’t crackers in my book, and after a decade of misuse by offline media I’m afraid that battle is pretty thoroughly lost. ^
June 29th, 2009 at 16:24
How would you describe what I do?
June 29th, 2009 at 23:53
You’re one of those awkward types who messes up my beautiful binary schema by mixing autobiographical material with link-heavy posts…
Seriously, I’d say that your site is about 65% linklog, 20% reviews and 15% online journal. (Why yes, I did pull those figures out of thin air? How did you guess?)
Given that the majority of your posts include links to other sites, albeit sometimes as a jumping-off point for your own thoughts on a topic, I think that your site still qualifies as a weblog as per footnote 1 above.
June 30th, 2009 at 16:12
I had thought the percentages were a bit closer than that but the thing does kind of undulated — it’s never been one thing or another or another.
I expect Meg (me)ish or someone is already working on a flow chart based on the above schema and then we’ll all know what we’re doing.
June 30th, 2009 at 23:40
What if some slightly lower-profile blogger already has worked it all out, and neither of us happens to have stumbled cross their site and read the flowchart explaining blogging, the universe and everything.
Even as I type this, I could be Doing It Wrong!
July 3rd, 2009 at 08:49
I keep meaning to start doing posts consisting mostly or entirely of just a bunch of links to stuff I read in the last few days I found really interesting, but have little or nothing to say about, but I’m so damn lazy, and particularly lazy about changing my habits. (Similarly, my blog template has desperately needed drastic updating for many years now, and I desperately need to drop blogrolling and handcode a new blogroll, but that’s be work, and the latter would involve a dreadful amount of thinking about criteria and other such horrid things.
But I have been fairly unhappy for a very long time about how my output of more substantive posts has diminished and diminished, while I continue to read tons of stuff I think is fascinating, even if I don’t have time/energy to write much of energy about most of it. Must get around to doing something about this, sooner or later.
July 3rd, 2009 at 08:54
Rosenberg has put all of his Chapter Nine, “Journalists versus Bloggers” here, I see.
July 3rd, 2009 at 20:11
I’m with you on the blogroll issue. Mine fell off the sidebar years ago – I think it was when my Movable Type database croaked and I switched to WordPress – and the main reason I haven’t revived it is that I can’t come up with a way to automate publishing and updating it that I like: the grouping approach that works for me reading sites via NetNewsWire on my Mac wouldn’t work in my sidebar, but I can’t make my mind up what would work.
As to the question of posting lots of links with little commentary, have you considered using a social bookmarking service like Delicious, where you can use a bookmarklet to post direct from your browser window and add as many tags or comments as you see fit (or none at all)? I’m sure I’m not the only Amygdala reader who would follow your Delicious RSS feed to see what you’ve been reading.
I appreciate that you might prefer not to have to point readers away from Amygdala, what with it having been the focus of your blogging for so long. As it turns out, Delicious has a feature (which they mark as ‘experimental’ despite it having been around for at least three or four years now) which allows you to tell Delicious your blog’s login details and which will then, at a time of day you set up, post the latest bookmarks you’ve posted to Delicious to Amygdala for you. These automatically-generated posts would show up like any other post, keeping Amygdala ticking over inbetween the longer posts you’d write as you do now.
The only drawback I can see is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to filter your Delicious bookmarks so as to exclude/include particular tags, so you would have to commit to using Delicious solely as a source of potential blog entries and forego using it to store non-blog items.
I’ve posted a screendump of the page where a Delicious user can set this up here. This post includes instructions on how a Blogspot user should fill in the fields.
I can’t vouch for how well this blog-posting feature works in practice, but it looks as if it might make it easier for you to fill the gaps between your more substantive posts by simply pointing your readers to the stuff you’ve been reading online.