meta b

Blogs are
not just pieces of paper. With a blog a writer
is an indepenent
publishing entity as well as a maker of texts.
This is empowering...

Nick Piombino on how blogging might change poetry

In the end, all writers need is a way
to exchange their writing and their ideas.


As I’ve been using blogging as a research tool for several years now, I’m starting to reach some conclusions. What it does most of all is encourage a sort of discipline to write. The time-centered nature of blogging makes you want to keep something on your page that is fresh
This Public Address
But thirdly, and most importantly, blogging forces you to focus when you write—blogging creates reader-centered writing. An audience, however small, is always out there to stumble on you by just the right search-engine mojo




Further, blogs aren't old, like an HTML document that's been there since 1997. Instead, blogs are very likely to be something that interests [the blogger] greatly. Bloggers are writing all the time about what's current in various contexts and subject categories. Blogs are off-the-cuff, candid, real—and now.
Contagious Media John Patrick on Weblogs (via anil dash)
I think we'll see blogging become the first derivative of the Web. It takes the Web to a higher level. It allows for more effective communications and sharing of information in a very structured way. So it will enable millions of people to infuse their points of view into the knowledge stream, a kind of massive enrichment of knowledge. Sure, there will always be wackos and dumb blogs, just as there are wackos and dumb Web sites and dumb forms of media now

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Comments: meta b

and as the blog moves on from today, it build up a store of current memories, the question will be how to turn this store into a usable long term store

a question which if it becomes a concern in the bloggers mind wil influence the writing/posting...
Posted by Henka at December 3, 2003 09:47 AM

Yes - this is a really interesting point, Henka.
Blogs have this duality of the topical - the ephemera of the moment - and the archival.
The records are there but largely unused, except through occasional searches. But the thought of losing my own makes me rather anxious - even though they are yesterday's news.
I suppose if I enabled categories, my own personl store would be more useable, and there may be other simple strategies from a technical point of view.
The aesthetics of transcending ephemera is another thing.
Love your blog btw.
Posted by boynton at December 3, 2003 11:21 AM

Blogs as a permanent record of fleeting thoughts is both exciting and utterly terrifying. I have already started to self-censor, and I know several other people who read blogs but won't start one because of the potential problems it might cause in the future. This all arises because blogs occupy a peculiar area between the private and the public.

An excellent source of metablogging fodder is Corante's blogging blog. It's on hiatus at the moment, but the archives are a wealth of information.
Posted by Robert at December 4, 2003 03:22 AM

yes it's that mix of archive and the all-knowing steel trap mind of Google as big brother archivist that is cause for pause. I've tried to steer clear of the (litigous, allegedly)confessional, (that is - assuming anything may one day be litigious) so I don't think my archives will come back to haunt me in that regard.
Checked out Corante, and shall explore the archives. Thanks.
'Empty Bottle' is also good on the meta, and categorised.
Posted by boynton at December 4, 2003 12:46 PM

It is reported that Eleanor Roosevelt said whenever everyone is thinking alike, no one is thinking very well. This simple but profound truth is applicable in every field but especially in the bloggosphere.

However, as Winston Smith noted when he finished reading the occult "inner-party" book in Nineteen Eighty-Four: "The best books (blog links & entries)... are those that tell you what you know already."

We know also too well that there are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts, we long to blog even more about them...

"Everywhere in the world literature is in retreat from politics and unless resisted the one will crush the other. You don’t crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish, though as we’ve all seen you can make a big fuss and have a lot of fun trying. You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes, as you propose to do."
Kingsley Amis, The Russian Girl
Posted by Jozef at December 7, 2003 02:35 PM

diversity and universality.
that duality is also there in the apparent paradox where the more local we get, the more universal are the themes. This is the great appeal of the 'place bloggers', the single grain of sand.
As far as truths too terrible to be revealed, I'm wondering what you mean, Jozef. On a personal level, even though I may have set myself up by going with a pseudonym, I don't feel as if I'm holding back a great deal. Gradually any remnants of persona have disappeared (as much as they can) and I've even reverted to the 1st person, as I found my voice was more unfettered in the comments without that rather silly conceit.
However as someone who has been more used to fictionalising reality, I'm wary of letting it go "unsorted" without placing it into some greater "pattern". Perhaps this is why I have resisted the smaller, candid details which I enjoy reading elsewhere.
But then - perhaps you don't mean the personal at all, and are urging us to stop trifling and get serious? Such a call to arms is always quite confronting...
Posted by boynton at December 8, 2003 06:49 PM