Month: June 2002

for whom the blog/journal is another place to noodle away at thoughts of oneself and one’s world.

prose fiction didn’t really hit its stride until after the printing press. question: is this also true of non-fiction? what were the dominant forms for non-fiction before 1500? I seem to remember the heyday of the diary, in English lit, starting with the 1700s.

creativity and technology are connected.

how do you communicate the excitement and value of blogging?

I loved Cory Doctorow’s essay on the weblog as backup brain, and I think that concept would have appeal for many who have no interest in participating in “peer-review” blogging. I keep recommending it to C, who sends zillions of emails with neat stuff he’s found, and has a hell of a time organizing bookmarks.

for someone already drawn to writing, the weblog has the same value as the timed freewrite, the daily exercise, or any other tricks to keep writing and exercising that skill, again, regardless of its connection to the rest of the world. but here the connection begins to mean something, the link to another writer or from another writer. my experience is that writers love to talk about writing and to share their experience with like-minded souls. (so don’t be afraid of the meta-blogging; it’s what writers do.) and here’s an environment where my thoughts can draw from yours, where you can pull out a quote or a concept and take it in an entirely different direction. (what John Hiler calls the borg.)

the form matters, as much as the people do. really, I mean that. w/out the form being there, without the conventions of format and the means of production, this mighty web of words doesn’t exist, at least not this way. I am better informed, more thoughtful, more aware than I was before I came into this genre of writing and entered its world…and I was making web pages, thinking about the web, thinking about other things in the world, before last April when I started my weblog, and started reading other people’s blogs…I was writing before then, long before the web even existed. (I wrote my first poems in 1983, my first stories a couple of years after that. in 1992, when the web was brand-new, I was writing my first novella, which at the time I thought was a novel)

I seem to remember (from lit classes, reading, etc.) that it took a while, after the invention of the printing press, for writing forms to come into being that really used the new format in ways that were native to it. and that was with a technology (writing, books) that had already existed for thousands of years; but w/in that context, cheap books were a revelation – a revolution. (note that the Reformation, democratic movements, and mass literacy all follow this technological advance.)

maybe it’s not the best analogy, but today it’s what I’ve got.

soon there will be a real live garage sale…

stavros keeps it going – I posted my piece below in his comments; we’ll see if anyone takes notice, or if I continue to be the smallest fish in every goddamn pond I’ve ever been in. not that I’m bitter.

css contest

note the boy/girl ratio in these pictures.

mount rainier scenic railroad – I think I’ve linked this before…but I can’t find it.

I’d actually turned off the computer and was going to bed, but I was thinking about stavros’ (and others’) comments on Meg’s O’Reilly article and wanted to get it down before I forgot.

what makes the weblog interesting?

first, it’s a new genre. Meg identified several of the important elements of the genre: reverse chronology (rarely used in other written genres, part of what made Momento unique – from what I hear, anyway; I still haven’t seen it), permalinks, and timestamps.

I would add three more key elements: the “post”, the link, and comments. the post is the smallest possible unit of a weblog, like a stanza in a poem or a chapter in a book. it may be a single sentence, or even a single word, or a micro-essay, or (see hoopla) a mini-short story. the link is what makes permalinks meaningful; it ties the weblog to other web genres and weblogs into a continuous chain of being – or something like that. comments, while not common to all weblog formats, can add richness – the conversation that the cluetrain-type folks find so interesting. commenting systems bridge the grenre of the weblog to the (genre of?) bulletin boards.

and a new genre is a fascinating thing, in and of itself. phrasing the form as a genre also allows for analysis of individual weblogs, or groups of weblogs, as participants in a genre, much as one might analyze asimov and le guin as participating in the science fiction genre…not all artists within a genre use all the common elements of it.

what the weblog adds that creates additional buzz (rightfully so, I think) is that they incorporate a new means of production. any idiot can have a weblog. I’ve often thought that every writer should have a weblog, whether they’re interested in technology or not. money is not an issue; technological savvy (assuming you can type and use a browser) is not an issue; design skill – or even writing skill – is not an issue.

which creates this vast cloud of individuals, all working at once in a brand-new genre. and that intersection is where things get interesting…because of one/two feature(s) of the genre.

the link, in general – links, both the ephemeral day-to-day linking and the “blogroll”, create an informal editing or peer-review process. one links to those one finds interesting, useful, funny, thought-provoking, etc. the permalink allows the linking blogger to jump directly to the thought of the linked blogger; along with commenting, this creates a work larger than the sum of its parts. (I’ll be curious to see what comes of burningbird’s threading concept; it could add something very significant to the genre – maybe playing the role that the pulp mags did for scifi in the middle 20th century? or not; it’s hard to say.)

so people form informal networks – much like magazines w/out editors, except that they are mass-edited by those who choose to link – the warbloggers, the a-listers, the cluetrain folk – and each informal network drives the genre in new directions. (note that each individual also has a definition of these networks: I think of burningbird, stavros, Dorothea, AKMA and Weinberger as a network, but I don’t know if they think of themselves that way.)

I’m beginning to ramble, and I’ve run out of steam on my original idea, so I’m going to call it a night. tomorrow sometime I’ll come back & add relevant links. I’d like to find a way to toss this out into blogspace, but I’m not sure how. 🙂 a good start might be to rewrite in a more rigorous mode.

I’ve forgotten my own mantra, in trying to give this little site some actual design. I’ve been thinking about how it looks on my monitor, not how it might fall apart for others. ergo the fixed size of the top nav, the workarounds on the sidebar & main panel, which led to the problem with the monogram. I wanted to try something different, something beautiful, and I forgot my own favorite lesson about the web: it is what it is, and you can’t absolutely control it. so back to the drawing board, I think. the color palette stays, though.

I’d like to get a comment system running again, one of these days. I downloaded blogback, but don’t have the brainpower tonight to figure out if it’ll work on my current host’s server.

also, if there’s any one feature that would really mean something for blogger pro, it’d be commenting.

(and I realized that I screwed up my template – just moved the date outside of the postsubject tag, so that the date & permalink still appear even if there’s no subject. hopefully.)

damn it, the background-color in the main div screws up the display of my pretty little monogram in the bottom right corner. (you can see it on the home page, or should be able to. maybe I’ll move it out of the body tag & into #main, see what that does. bleh, I don’t like that either. I am going to have to rework this design…again. too many interacting pieces, I think.)

additional thoughts on Dorothea’s entry on work and ‘blogging….

“The dissociators work for wankers; it really is that simple.”

ummmm, maybe…or better yet, not quite. I have a work weblog, which is pretty damn wonky & technical, not to mention filled with lists of things to do and notes about projects in progress. it’s my tool for me, not intended for anybody else really, although I write it assuming that my boss (at least) is reading it.

that blog doesn’t link to this one, and there probably won’t be a permanent link from here to there (sidebar-style), though. and on neither blog do I talk about my work environment as a personal experience. not at all here (excepting, of course, this very entry, and some early entries possibly to be discussed later), and very little on the other. and there, it’s only as those things relate to what I’m working on.

why is that? I certainly wouldn’t call my boss a wanker, even if this were a totally anonymous site; he’s a smart guy, thoughtful and good-humored. yes, he’s very concerned with the image of the college, but then again, he’s the head of what is, essentially, marketing – it’s his job to be.

when I first started this thing, I didn’t really realize that it was so public. (naive, I know.) and I wrote a few things that were perhaps not too diplomatic. (no, I’m not going to link to them. do you think I’m an idiot?) and somebody found my blog because of a link I’d forgotten to remove from the intranet, and he/she (to this day I don’t know who) complained to my boss. we had a long conversation, and I agreed (a) to be more judicious about when I post and (b) to not post about work. (or something like that, I don’t remember the exact wording of part (b), though that’s how I’ve implemented it.)

[I’m trying to decide now whether to leave in that para. I think it’s germane to what I want to write here, but I don’t know where it’s going to be seen or linked or if I’ll hear about it from someone I would’ve never thought of…..]

it’s that we live in a wanker culture. I know that it’s not just this job – I would’ve had the same problem, probably even more so, at my last job, or the one before that. social lying is bred into us, and when you speak with a totally naked voice, it’s frightening to the culture.

more to the point, it’s easier to be harsh in one’s judgements of the world and one’s fellow creatures, and one’s corporate masters (tho I work for the gov’t…and I’m more anxious about how I present my work for that reason), in text than in person. is it fair to be deadly honest when you know you wouldn’t be in person? prob’ly not. what’s the answer? I’d like to think that it’s more honesty in person, but I’m so conflict-averse that I don’t know if I could ever do it.

interestingly enough, I do write here and there about my work – I love web design/programming, and I’d still be doing it if I were still a sad little admin at united way. getting paid, in some ways, is just a bonus. I’d actually like to spend more energy writing about the technology, since it fascinates me…and that focus is very strong, and I’d like to think clear as well, in my workblog. what I don’t – and can’t – write about is my work environment.

which gets back to my thought about culture. work cultures have their own rules, and one of the rules is that you don’t talk about fight club. sorry, wrong rules…but maybe not. you don’t talk about what the culture is, what it’s built on. plus it’s a strange thing, work culture, in that it is and isn’t organic. the people who stay around (the “old-timers” in any office) have organically developed a culture, with mores, rules, traditions, feuds, etc. – but that culture is disrupted on a fairly regular basis by new people who bring their own previous experiences/cultures. sometimes the culture adapts to the new people, sometimes the new people adapt to the culture. writing publicly about your work’s culture – more so than about the friends of your real identity – disrupts the unspoken agreements built into the work culture.

am I a real person at work? do I express my real identity? huh. trick question, I think.

but I re-read Mark’s amazing essay on writing and secrets and I know that secrets are poisonous.

so I won’t write about my work environment, because I promised someone I respect, and because I don’t want to give it that much energy, frankly. I will, however, write about design, programming, and the issues involved. and I will be honest about my personal existence here, respecting boundaries that others have asked for. (for example, C has requested that I not write about him or the details of our relationship, so I only refer to him in passing where it’s germane to whatever else I happen to be writing about. it’s very anais nin, I think.) if you find this, and you know me in “real life”, and what you read here isn’t what you expected of me, then that’s your issue, not mine. the persona I wear in this space may not be the exact persona you’ve known elsewhere, but it’s part of who I am as well.

but I won’t write about the house yet, because I don’t want to jinx it. 🙂

[I’m not entirely happy with the results of this ramble, but it gets close to what I really need to say.]

we went to see The Sum of All Fears yesterday. I like a good red-meat action movie as much as the next gal, but…. it could’a been good, I think, but too many absurd plot holes (C alleges that there wasn’t actually a plot), and Ben Affleck‘s tone-deaf acting…. I even like Affleck, on occassion (see Chasing Amy), but he’s not exactly Jack Ryan, even forgetting Harrison Ford’s earlier performances. I’d love to see Affleck starring with Keanu Reeves, just for the train-wreck-ness of it.

the other thing that bugged me was how the near-destruction of an american city by a nuclear weapon was basically just background color. the idea was horrifying, esp. having been a kid who was terrified of that sort of thing, but they just didn’t use it very well.

but I did take one thought out of it: this movie was the revenge of the report-writers, the people who spend their lives sitting in front of computers putting together powerpoint presentations for their bosses. “damn it, I know what I’m talking about!” 😛

Dorothea

Mark, spurred by the dooce incident

and less seriously, Jacob.