Thanks to people who commented here during the past week. Commenters included:
David Weinberger, who commented on Gem
Aunt Hentic, from the palindromically named Ekalaka Lake country who shared a recipe for Emperor Trout.
annie commented on the skull (no roses)
papa, bmo, annie, and Winston commented on mighty morphin’ art girls…
Thanks to Doug and Scruggs who were kind enough to let me know that the code in a YouTube embedding was all horked up. Interesting WordPress bug there… the editor changes “embed” to “ibed” in every instance. Maybe it is reading the “em” from “embed” as a request to italicize, and so converts those “em”s to “i”s messing everything up. If you just publish without previewing, you’re fine; but, if you preview, then the editor will run that little conversion and if you were then to publish, well BORK (rhymes with HORK, means everything is horked up and nothing is embedded).
Bruce and zooomabooma expressed deadheadly appreciation around my Ripple post. The zooomster didn’t get where I was coming from, devaluing as I was the collaboration of Barlow and Weir when compared to that of Hunter and Garcia. But partly that may be a matter of taste, I guess. Several of Barlow’s songs are quite nice, particularly after a few bottles of Stormhoek.
Jmo, Madame L., and Shirl each expressed a womanly appreciation for my “man on a tractor” pix (although the euro crew seemed to sublimate their appreciation through a discussion of headgear). Tom brought the discussion around to heavy equipment, and thereby added a a manly balance. And Aunt Hentic reappeared with some engine block cookery suggestions. The idea of cooking on an engine block sort of reminds me of Scruggs’ squirrel repellent recipe.
Again, my thanks to everyone who took a moment out of their busy days to leave a comment or two here last week. And a primitive animistic curse involving squirrels with yellow teeth and infected gums on those of you who didn’t.
[tags]cooking, hats, wines with screw top closures, stormhoek[/tags]
Eek, squirrels? Well, let me be the first here to comment and say, thanks Frank, for your bloggeriferiness in wide general. All the more impressive when you make it clear that you *could* be out riding a truly cool tractor instead.
Hmmm… I don’t recall ever seeing a squirrel with yellow teeth. Must be an Upper Mid-west phenom…
As we roll along, blog rolls growing exponentially, the waistband of time continuing to shrink, RSS feeds becoming more de rigeur, it is so easy to fall into a trap of writing, glancing at feeds, and skipping the single most important thing that blogging has done for most of us — that is the building of relationships, one at a time, the sum of which results in community. For me, relationships need at least two dimensions, communications to and from. And that means comments.
I might not have a post every day of interest to you or others, but it is comforting to know that all of you are there, and by implication, that our community is alive and well, by your occasional comments.
The word synergy get misused, abused, and overused in many contexts, but the concept is alive and well in the blogosphere if we but fully participate.
Translation of the above paragraphs: comments is good.
When RSS was the next big thing I tried it on for a while and here’s what I found. I’m more likely to get fresh contextualized content from visiting the blog than I am from visiting my Feed Reader. If I put everybody who interests me into my feed reader, I still won’t read any individual any more often than if I have them listed in a blog roll or if I find them linked somewhere else.
RSS is probably a good way to aggregate content that you pay for, but except for a few squirrelly individuals with subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal, who is paying for periodical content on the web?
I agree with you, Winston. The blogosphere is a wonderfully extensible virtual salon, and we can’t have a salon without conversation and personal relationships.