I was going to write something about the impact of hurricane Katrina - on our collective consciousness, the "energy crisis", politics, humanity's relationship to nature and the land, comparisons to 9/11, and so on. Then I read Dave Pollard's article, "Do Events Like Katrina and 9/11 Make Us Crazy?" and he got most of my key points in there, so now all I really feel motivated to say is, "uhhh, what he said." Thanks, Dave. (But don't forget to find your sanity again - there's lots to be done.)
Tag: blogging
I've moved this weblog to use WordPress, instead of Movable Type. While I found Movable Type generally agreeable, WordPress has become a favorite as I've used it with the Summersault Weblog, especially in its handling of comment and trackback spam which, other than writing posts themselves, had become the most time-consuming part of having a weblog - not good. So, I'm still ironing out a few glitches from the transition, but otherwise it should be business as usual with a more consistent look thrown in; let me know if you notice any problems.
I was glad to find the site HappyNews.com, which publishes "up-to-the-minute news, geared to lift spirits and inspire lives." While I'm always a fan of balancing the good and the bad (or, in this case, the happy and the unhappy) and everything in between, there are plenty of sources out there for news stories framed in the context of all the things wrong with the world. This site appears to be making a good go at an alternate approach that focuses on the positive, and they even encourage paid citizen journalism.
One of the things that is difficult for me to deal with in the world of blogging and even just editorial/public writing in general is that for any given issue, it often feels like every possible perspective has been rendered by others in so many different ways well before *I* get to that issue. This has gotten "worse" with the advent of blogging, where those viewpoints are often published within minutes or hours of any given piece of information becoming available. So by the time I develop an opinion about something, I'm often left with the sense that it would be a waste of my time to say roughly the same things that have already been said, with only a minor degree of personalized presentation.
Continue reading "When it's all already been said"
(You can listen to the MP3 audio of this entry, too.)
Back in May I blogged about how blogs are different from the conventional process of putting up content on a website. I have a similar sentiment about the up-and-coming phenomenon of podcasting: people have been putting sound clips on the web for a long time, but a certain set of environmental factors have emerged that are really making this particular incarnation take off.
Continue reading "Podcasting, another non-fad fad"
The eminent and celebrated E. Thomas Kemp points us to a wonderful and clever use of news aggregation and weblog technologies, Plogress. Using Perl and WordPress, the apparently anonymous administrator has created a site that sucks data out of the Library of Congress and displays a blog of the doings of individual Senators and Representatives. Now I can keep an eye on Mike, Richard, and Evan through my RSS newsreader! I'm sure they all read my blog, right?
Jason Godesky has an interesting post up about why blogs are in a category all their own when it comes to publishing content online. It's a question I've thought about on occasion, given that I've had a personal website in some form or another since, um, 1994, and that I get indignant once in a while when people jump and scream that the blogging phenomenon is the shiny new thing that levels the playing field. It was the whole frickin Internet thing that was supposed to do that in the first place, people! But Jason has put his finger on some of the specifics about why blogging is different, though I have a few more to add.
Continue reading "Why blogs are different"
I thought I'd start a list of people in Richmond and Wayne County with active weblogs. If you have anyone to add, please let me know. The list will probably tend to exclude sites primarily dedicated to for-profit promoting of a particular organization, product or service. Enjoy!
You may or may not notice that I've incorporated some Google Ads into my weblog. It's my unabashed attempt to make whatever moo-lah I can off of this exercise in public writing (which does not, for what it's worth, have moo-lah generation as a primary goal). I'm not sure if I'll keep the ads: the concept in general already grates against my sense that there's too much advertising on your average website, and because of my affiliation with a certain company that does webhosting, it's not like I'm trying to cover any expenses of having the thing online at all. And yet, I haven't yet felt the need to take such a principled stand that I can ignore the allure of 5 minutes of HTML rearranging work translating into some level of income that wasn't there before. In any case, if they offend your (and here I am addressing the imaginary person who reads these ramblings with regularity because they are just SO inspiring) sensibilities, please let me know. Conversely, if you enjoy this stuff and want to cheer me on - financially or otherwise - I'll appreciate that feedback too!
It's been a while since I've posted. Lately, meaningless bits of miscellaneous commentary have been occurring to me at random moments, and I haven't had an outlet for them. So, what was once considered criteria for admission into a mental institution, is now the heart of the blogging phenomenon. Let's see what happens. (Look, I'm already back into successful blogging: a self-referential blog post about nothing at all!)