Bookworm

State of the Blog

I haven't been posting on this blog for a while, as I've become completely obsessed with paper crafting as a hobby.  My blog Lens is the most active right now, with pictures of cards I've made and the occasional photo.  I occasionally post on Twitter. 

• The best book I've read so far this year is Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier, about a woman who made a lot of great fossil discoveries in England in the early 1800's, but didn't receive a lot of recognition because she was female and from a working class family.
• I'm current reading The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris.  It is engaging, yet difficult to read.  You can't help but put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist or his wife and feel the stress of their situation. 
• I thoroughly enjoyed the Vancouver Olympics.  I felt like I got to see almost everything I was interested in and that the coverage by NBC was better.  There was a lot less emphasis on medals, and gold medals in particular (which we all understand is the goal and motivation for the athletes, needless to say) and the winners from other countries were recognized and interviewed.  It seemed like there were fewer biographical pieces and the ones they had were generally shorter. 
• The TV show Lost is in its final season and it boggles the mind to imagine that any of it will make sense in just few months. 
• I enjoy American Idol, but I honestly can't imagine the show without Simon.  The other judges' comments are a lot more relevant this season, but he's the most straight-forward. 

What Kind of Blogger Are You?

Who blogs? And why?

"If all these people really want from the Web is a hobby and to talk to their friends and family, they'd be better off taking pottery lessons and purchasing more cell-phone minutes." [Jack Shafer at Slate]

Shafer's column talks about the findings of a recent Pew survey of bloggers.  It's a relatively reasonable article, but he ends it with the above sentence.  What a stupid and rude thing to write.  I'm sure he was being facetious, but let's take it at face value. 

Why would bloggers be better off creating pottery instead of blog posts?  I'm sure it's cheaper to pay for a TypePad account than it would be to pay for pottery classes, supplies, kiln time, etc. 

Why would bloggers be better off purchasing more cell phone minutes to use for  more synchronous conversations, when, perhaps, it is the convenience of asynchronous communication that they find appealing?  Family and friends are spread across the globe and a convenient time for one to call might be supremely inconvenient to someone else.  Plus, a blog can be a permanent record in a way that phone calls cannot.  Finally, why on earth does Jack Shafer care what we do with our time?

Links of Interest sidebar

Frequent visitors may have noticed the new section of the left sidebar labeled "Links of Interest".  This shows the last five things I've bookmarked (tagged) on del.icio.us.  I'm trying to make short, pithy titles for these links, while still giving a clue as to what they are about . . . sometimes I'm more successful than others with this.  Enjoy.

I say, Amen, brother!

Ø    "Don’t apologize for cutting back on blogging. There’s no need.

Ø    You might let us know if you’re formally terminating a blog, but there’s no need to point out you’re disappearing for a week or a month—unless you’d like to mention why. (Congratulations to Cindi and Adri!)

Ø    Maybe it’s time for some of us to abandon target frequencies for blog posting. Maybe the target should be to say something worthwhile or amusing in each post.

Ø    You define what’s worthwhile. People will pick you up if your definition has some overlap with theirs. (I’m not sure I care much about anime, but I read bloggers who write about that as well as topics that I do care about.)

Ø    There’s nothing wrong with metablogging (writing about blogging). There’s nothing wrong with posts that don’t do much more than link. There’s nothing wrong with posts that don’t have links at all. There’s nothing wrong with maintaining big blogrolls—and there’s nothing wrong with omitting blogrolls entirely. There’s nothing wrong with going two days, a week, a month between posts—and then writing six posts totaling 5,000 words in one day, if that’s what you need to do. There’s nothing wrong with essay posts.

Ø    If anyone tells you that you’re not really blogging if you do any of the things in the previous bullet, ignore them. Blogging is a tool. It’s not a narrowly-defined medium."
[Walt Crawford: Cites & Insights 5:13]

Good Quote About Blogging

"Blogging isn't about politics, or technology, or food, or design. It's about all of those things, or none of them, or whatever topic catches your eye. It's as idiosyncratic and compelling as an individual, and it's a different medium to every person who's ever participated, or to every one who's ever dropped out." Anil Dash

Amen, brother.  It may be easier for the media to try to paint all of us with one or two broad brushes, but it isn't possible to accurately describe us all that way.  I'm not a blogger whose blog is primarily a journal, I'm not a teenager, I don't write a one topic blog.  It's a potpourri of thoughts and opinions and links and reactions and book reviews (yeah, I know, need to do more of that) and film reviews (ditto), primarily as a digital commonplace book.  Maybe I'll change my tagline to that sometime . . .

Tags: Build Your Own Taxonomy

Tags: the fledgling phenomenon of the moment (will it last?) at sites such as the wonderfully fun photo sharing site Flickr.  Tags are a "folksonomy" -- people attach their own tags (keywords, subject words, descriptors) to their photos, thereby creating an ad hoc taxonomy.  I enjoy this because of the serendipity of surfing the site by tags.  I love the fact that amorphous groups of individuals become linked simply by posting a picture and giving it the same tag as someone else has used for theirs. 

Since we're not talking research materials here, it doesn't matter that tags (as currently implemented) wouldn't work well for that type of application.  That's why taxonomies for various intellectual fields exist -- psychology, medicine, etc.  Catalogers and indexers use those taxonomies to catalog books, journal articles, and other materials so they can be found in the catalogs of libraries all over the world.  Otherwise, one person would catalog (or tag) an article as being about "heart attacks" and another would catalog a similar article as being about "myocardial infarctions." 

What's the Major Focus of this Blog, Anyway?

Occasional visitors may wonder what my main focus is here.  (This occurs to me as I try to arrange my favorite RSS feeds in Newsgator into categories.)  During baseball season, I blog a lot about the sport and the Yankees.  At other times, I'll be posting short movie reviews, or book reviews.  At other times, you'll find me posting on current events.  So, if you like all of that, just keep visiting this main page, or sign up for the RSS feed (link in the lefthand column).  If you're only interested in one of those topics, just bookmark one of the subject indexes at the top of right column.  And, as always, glad you stopped by.