sifterhood

It was nice to be placed within this collection of sifter blogs, most of whom are serious sifters who consistently uncover original stuff. I think boynton is somewhere down the sifiting chain mostly, picking over the siftings until I lift some link as a hook. Tales from the tailings. (via the real deal: exclamation mark and idle type)



Women making nets ...nets are made for agriculture and sport as well as fishing
British Fishing in the 1950s (via Making Light)

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Comments: sifterhood

I don't know what the big deal about making nets is.

It's pretty bloody easy. You just get a bunch of holes and sew them together.
Posted by Nabakov at December 12, 2004 08:22 AM

Row upon Row
You watch it Grow...

http://www.bertaut.com/netmaking.html
Posted by boynton at December 12, 2004 11:36 AM

Bloghorrea? Isn't that taken?

That fishing site makes me thing Pressberger and Powell missed a golden topic to mine for at least a couple of fillums.

And as for Ealing, well, they should have been all over it.
Posted by Tony.T at December 12, 2004 01:02 PM

Yes it is, round these parts. But it's a division of "Give Get Give Take and Have" which I've just added to the roll.

That'd be Jellied Ealing?
Posted by boynton at December 12, 2004 01:33 PM

It would be ridiculous of me to feel miffed at being left off that list. Therefore I'm not miffed. Not.
Posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden at December 13, 2004 02:36 PM

That's OK Theresa, don't un-miff yourself entirely, you should start your own Miffter List.

Actually, if your last name was Green, we could make puns like Trees-Are Green.

But it's not, so we can't. That is disappointing.
Posted by Tony.T at December 13, 2004 10:01 PM

Mifters are doing it for themselves? ;)

(Though I'm miffed on your behalf, Theresa, as of course I regularly sift through "Particles" for serious sifting to lift.)
Posted by boynton at December 13, 2004 11:20 PM

I know, but you link back to Particles, and you say interesting things, so I've never minded it for a minute. Clearly, you're enjoying the links and engaging with them, which is the whole point of the exercise. Life as it should be. A Good Thing.

My weblogs are freebies, universally accessible. Readers are inevitably going to use them for their own purposes. I get a kick out of seeing some meme I started (I mean "meme" in its original sense, not the LJ kind) getting shared around and spread along odd vectors, mutating as it goes. That's fun.

What irritates me -- and it's one of those things where I feel silly for letting it get to me at all, but sometimes it bugs me anyway -- is running across a weblog that has lifted five or six or seven Particles links in a row. Literally, they'll have come in and picked up a big chunk of the current display, re-posting it in their own weblog -- often enough in the same order, frequently with no additional or intervening material; likewise with no linkbacks or credit.

I know the same thing happens to Cory Doctorow. In fact, I know it happens to Cory oftener than it happens to me. I forget how many blogs I've stumbled across that were picking up a substantial fraction of their total content from his posts at BoingBoing, adding nothing in the process. I don't see the point. Where's the fun in it for them?

But I truly shouldn't let it get to me. As I keep reminding myself, those people aren't shameless. They're just clueless.
Posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden at December 14, 2004 01:53 AM

Thanks Teresa, I'm glad I've got the green light to mutate. And yes, I prefer the "Clueless" theory for those cybersinners who fail to cite their sources.

It can sometimes get tricky about links and original content. If a blog is a web log, (or on days when that is all it is) then there is an impulse to simply log everything that manages to catch the subjective attention.
This probably accounts for the replication of current links among sifters - esepcially those on the blogroll - inevitably like-minded when it comes to links?
In general I do try to follow the link-with-a-tangent school, and add some take on it, some days are better than others.
In the daily barrage of linkage there is a place for the sub-sifters, to slow things down by a close examination of one link. But the flow is often too compelling - I wish I could restrict myself to one link a day. Maybe in my next blog life.
Posted by boynton at December 15, 2004 02:14 PM

Boy do I get guilty about this. Particularly when I arrive on a site and find a little bunch of things I really like.

But then I am chuffed when someone picks it up from me. As long as we all acknowledge the Great Chain of Blogger Being.

My particular snarly fetish is labelling pictures. I really really want to know where things come from. And I really really don't want to twist the use of something, unless they are engaged in the public political debate. How would you like the face of your adorable tot arriving anonymously on some Alaskan site labelled as Uglikid of the week? You only have to break the chain once, and the thing is anonymous from that time on.
Posted by David Tiley at January 14, 2005 02:52 PM

ps - I will even email people to say I have done it, if I think the pic is fabulous; I have yet to get a reply so I think the email addresses on websites are generally garbage.

Or maybe they are so convulsed with rage they can't touch the keyboard.
Posted by David Tiley at January 14, 2005 02:54 PM

I hope I'm not guilty of this, eg. via Goggle Image Search, which tends to present everything as a sort of open source, decontextualised pixel farm ripe for twisting into hotlinked collages.

(btw have you seen Google Montage?)

There is some attraction (as well as ease) in viewing the web as dynamic found data, though I must say I wouldn't want to see an image of my late labarador on an Alaskan ugly dog site.
The bluey is fair game.

To be more serious - maybe there is a (fine but definite) line to be observed (voluntarily) in appropriation/co-option.
Posted by boynton at January 14, 2005 06:56 PM