Blogging Blog

Have Blogs Lost Their Humanity? & Links

Today you get more than links, because I need to write about something that has been annoying me. It might annoy you, too. The fact that I'm writing about this two weeks after the fact just reinforces why I am not an A-list blogger.

ATTN: Tech Bloggers! You are not all there is. Yours are not the only blogs; you are not the only bloggers.

Last month, Robert Scoble (whom I read, ironically, due to a Montana -- that is, a human -- connection) wrote:

. . . there’s something deeper going on on on blogs.

1. Blogs have lost their humanity. Their weirdness. Instead we’ve become vehicles to announce new products and initiatives  . . .
2. We’ve gotten too caught up in the TechMeme games.
3. We’re bored. The interesting stuff is happening off blogs . . .
4. Creative stuff and ideas and questions are getting spread out all over the place.

I tried to challenge him on this in comments, but gave up when he responded, after several exchanges (in one of which he told me I have no clue):

Blogs as a medium for online literary magazines: lessons from qarrtsiluni

Today's Guest Poster is Dave Bonta. You can learn more about Dave at the end of this post.

Two years ago, when some friends and I started a new blog called qarrtsiluni, we weren't really thinking of publishing an online literary magazine. The idea was simply to create a place to share our best work, more selective than a typical group blog or an aggregator for a blog network -- two other ideas on the table at the time.

As valuable as the discipline of blogging can be, the never-revise, never-look-back mentality sometimes prevents us from writing as well as we should. We thought it would be fun if we invited a bunch of writers and artists to contribute work on a single topic or in a single style for a couple months at a time, and found volunteers to act as temporary editors, make all the hard decisions, and help with revisions if necessary.

It turned out, of course, that some of the conventions of literary magazine publishing were worth adopting. After some ten months of confusion occasionally bordering on chaos, two of us stepped forward to act as managing editors and began to formulate a more coherent vision and set of procedures. (You can read the results on our About and How to Contribute pages.)

We began to talk about "issues" rather than "theme-periods." We built an email notification list, began to solicit submissions from writers we knew, and got qarrtsiluni listed on Duotrope's Digest. And at some point during a site re-design in spring 2006, my co-editor Beth Adams slipped in a new tagline: online literary magazine.

Personal Blogging|Blogging for the love of it

Lorelle at Wordpress published a series of posts recently on Personal Blogging, by guest blogger Edrei Zahari. (You'll find links to the whole series at the bottom of each post; don't neglect the comments.) In response, Damien Riley confesses that "Personal blogging has become my fixation," and points to The Online Diary History Project for some context.

I was pleased to see these, as I think this is a large -- and largely overlooked -- segment of the blogging community. Most of the writing about blogging is aimed at the probloggers -- that is, business bloggers (or meta-bloggers) who are blogging for money. Most of the mainstream media attention goes to political bloggers, who blog about power, and may make a bit of money while they do so (or not.)

Problogger seems a completely appropriate name for these folks; a melding of professional and blogger.

Click to read more:

ATTN: Bloggers

We have a couple of global events coming up.

First, from Listics:

OneWebDay: September 22

The Web is worth celebrating.

OneWebDay is one day a year when we all - everyone around the physical globe - can celebrate the Web and what it means to us as individuals, organizations, and communities.

As with Earth Day - an inspiration and model for OneWebDay - it’s up to the celebrants to decide how to celebrate. We encourage all celebrations! Collaboration, connection, creativity, freedom.

By the end of the day, the Web should be just a little bit better than it was before, and we’ll be able to see our connection to it more clearly.

Then, via problogger:

Blog Action Day: October 15

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future...

Both of these look challenging, fun, and possibly even worthwhile. I'm giving them some thought.

Other blogging items to think about:

From Blog Sisters we have The W Magical List of Women Bloggers. Now, it's possible to get weary of this issue, and we do have several 'lists' of women bloggers -- but it's tough to not welcome a new one. Besides, it gives me an excuse to post an updated version of this:

Blog Bubbles

All the content on my blogs is original, but I don't get huge amounts of traffic. The Housing Bubble Blog, on the other hand, consists mostly of quotes from news articles, with snippets of commentary here and there. It might be fair to say that the entire blog is plagiarized. (Though, with some mixed feelings, I do read it, since it's interesting.)

The Housing Bubble Blog regularly gets 100 or more comments on a daily basis. I'm lucky if I get one measly comment on any post I submit to any blog (including this one). The housing bubble does seem to be a hot topic, however, and the few blogs I've checked in that arena seem to stir up quite the commentary. Housing bubble blogs are hot right now!

So maybe I'm targeting the wrong blog niche...except a thought has occured to me:

What if we are experiencing a Housing Bubble Blog Bubble...meaning, an artificial glut of Housing Bubble Blogs in the blogosphere! As a late adopter to the Housing Bubble Blog Bubble, if I tried to jump in now, I'd probably get screwed. I'd invest far too much for not enough return.

Perhaps, then, I should look ahead to the next Blog Bubble. What will it be? Stocks? Real estate? Dutch tulips? If I can be ahead of the game, I too can be the early adopter who gets in first and leaves when profits are good.

Goals Roundup

For no good reason I can think of at the moment, I set a goal for myself to do a roundup of this week's group writing project.

One hundred and thirty posts. That's 130 posts. One hundred and thirty submissions to this week's ProBlogger Group Writing Project. You have to be good to stand out in a crowd like that.

Last week I started at the top of the list, and began to lose steam toward the bottom. This time I started at the end and bounced around a bit, but generally moved toward the top. Next week I'm likely to abandon this idea altogether -- though it's certainly not a waste of time; there is some good stuff in there.

Oh, the Harsh Economics of Blogging

I've posted a piece on the earnings of my blog versus my rewards from a popular writer's site in:

I Have Become a Gather Whore

Habits of Effective Bloggers

Six Habits of Effective Bloggers:

1. Get out of bed
2. Drink whatever caffeine stimulant appeals to you.
3. Take & upload a few pictures of the cat.
4. Write.
5. Post.

You think I'm kidding?

Sometimes managing #1 is a challenge; #2 is then a requirement. Without #3, this blog would no doubt have stayed in dim obscurity -- this is not how I imagined making The New York Times.

If your topic is narrow, you are likely to have a ready-made audience; all that is needed is to bring your blog to its attention -- assuming, of course, that you provide good content. If you are not blogging for business, or around some specific topic or hobby, then how will a potential reader find you? Well, one way is that they may stumble across you while looking for something else; cats, for instance.

Why would you be blogging, if not for work, or money, or politics, or some other specificity?

Maybe because blogging (that ugly, guttural word) is, itself, an art form. Or can be. Then blogging is simply a tool, or a medium -- like clay, or language. So one must learn to use this tool -- to sail this craft -- just as another artist must learn the qualities of canvas and paint and color, or whatever means of expression s/he uses.

That means some tedium; learning at least a bit of code, so that one can display that cat picture in the most appealing manner -- floated, or centered, or wrapped in text, as the case may be. It means learning how (and whether) to do a blogroll, and how to ping the services that send you readers, and how to market whatever art it is that you are making. And let's not pretend that marketing doesn't matter. If you didn't care whether anyone looked, you wouldn't put it online.

Somewhere around #4 & #5, you add your blog to yet another directory, and spend some time reading another blog -related blog, to see if there is something new to learn. And you learn it. Because if blogging is your art form, then you must keep exploring the techniques, the possibilities.

It's a different thing than using a blog to display some other kind of art -- paintings, or photographs, or poems. Then the blog is simply a gallery, or an online page. Many are, and quite good ones at that. But I mean something different -- something I don't even know yet. Something I am discovering as I go.

The most important thing -- whether you are blogging for art, or blogging for business -- is the missing #6 on the list. It's idling.

Idling meaning, doing something, reading something, imagining something, apparently unrelated to blogging. Doing nothing. Meandering, physically or otherwise. While wandering about, one is likely to stub one's toe on an idea, or an image, or a link that sparks yet another, and another -- and then here you are, at the keyboard, blogging.

It's a challenge, that balance -- to take the time, the silence and solitude, to find something fresh; and to take the time, the noise and community, to stay connected and current. To write; to post.

[Crossposted to Watermark]