Listics

Dave pointed me to Susan’s place, where a list of her fave blogs is posted.  Here’s a list of the top ten bloggers I read to stay in touch, to be informed, to be delighted…  again, these are ten of the bloggers I read without fail, not all of the bloggers I read without fail:

Chris - both the CBO and the EGR, extending our boundaries… simply a genius
Shelley - brilliant, sensitive, a writer’s writer   

Norm - the guy could be my alter ego based on his choice of what to post
Dave - or "scoop" as I like to call him.  There are a lot of interesting things that I read about here first.
Doc - two scoops.  I like Doc better than ice cream
David - johoho, how seasonal!
Jeneane - currently, tales of the pig - personal, deep, powerful, well crafted… regardless of subject
Mike - truth - complex, morbid sometimes, but always truth
Dervala - a window on the world, a window on the human spirit, a brilliant writer
(Number ten?  …u-pick: if  they’re on my blog roll, the odds are I’m reading them, and a top ten list sucks bigtime since I have to leave off more favorite bloggers than I have room to include)

First a big, if somewhat belated Happy Birthday to Betsy!

Now, a year ago, I had a Radio blog.  It was at http://www.sandhilltech.com/weblog/blogger.html/

The name itself tells you something about the history of the bugger.  When I started my Radio Blog, I imported my posts from my Blogger blog.  The Blogger blog was an experiment several layers deep in a domain I’ve owned for a long time…  it was fairly well hidden beneath ROBOTS NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW meta tags, so I could see hits that came from other blogs linking, uninflated by the Google search hits.  But that’s not the point.

In January this year I shifted to Typepad mostly for the portability, it’s easy for me to blog from any PC.  There’s a point to this story.  But that’s not it either.

I think I was averaging three or four dozen hits per day in 2024, certainly always less a hundred visitors.  Then one day Dave Winer was tickled by a cat picture I posted and he linked to it.  My hit-count went through the ceiling!  Yes - here’s the point.

Today, just a few hours ago, Dave linked to that same picture that lives out in that old domain, a data set I keep online solely out of a personal desire to prevent link rot.  I still have a hit counter on the old blog.  Here’s what the traffic there looks like this month… 

And note the last few hours activity (differences due to time I’ve spent doinking around while preparing this post)…

That’s juice.  There are a LOT of Scripting News readers.

Serendipitous conjunction this morning where US Interstate Highway intersects US Highway 53 North…

Current issue of Foreign Policy magazine’s article on blogging by Drezner and Farrell…

Loic Le Meur’s "Global Voices" post, linked to…

Rebecca MacKinnon’s post heralding the launch of a "Global Voices" movement…

…with a link through Global Voices Online to…

The Digital Divide Network.

Join today!

This post is by way of acknowledgement of the earlier post at her own blog and at IT Kitchen on this very subject by Sharon Brogan (aka sbpoet).   I don’t know but I suspect that Sharon’s earlier post there gave rise to my recent efforts to collate responses from a wide variety of bloggers on this subject.  I do know that I had her post in my list for linking and left it out due to a disorderly composition process and general lack of editorial control here at Paynter Publications International.

Sorry I missed you on my first pass Sharon.

Martin Kuhn seeks responses to questions regarding blogging ethics.  I personally go by sense of "feel."  I usually know I’ve suffered a lapse after the fact.  Often rude language and ad hominem signals a lapse.  Sometimes a breach of expectations represents an ethical challenge.  Bob Park, a local Unitarian and friend of mine, comments on a post below and in commenting reminds me that calling Christian Fundamentalists ignoramuses and dumb fucks is a lapse at best.  Dervala, Jonathon, and Euan all know that I don’t always complete what I start in a timely way. 

Is it ethical for me to ban comments from people who annoy me? 

Anyway, these are some of the things I’m rolling around as I prepare to answer Martin’s request regarding blogging ethics.

Rebecca Blood covered this subject well over two years ago.  I’m paying better attention today.

Bloggers like blackbirds…

Frank,

I started because Doc Searls and I were having marathon phone calls,
enjoying our echo chamber. As Dave Winer had exhorted him, Doc pushed me
into blogging, perhaps just to get us off the phone.

I have a genetic need to work out my thoughts, hopes and resentments on
‘paper’. So my blog does for me what legal pads once did.

I keep blogging because I’ve met so many great people like you through this
medium. I’m amazed to be introduced to a blogger I’ve never met, and our
conversation picks up where it left off.

Out of the threads of our now-shared thoughts, hopes and resentments we’re
making a quilt of our common sense of how things should work. Each
individual piece of our quilt stands on its own, but collectively a better
picture emerges than any tapestry that one of us might weave alone.

But enough about me. Whadda you think of my latest post?

Thanks for asking this question, which seems to be blogger flypaper.

Posted at http://www.blaserco.com/blogs/2004/12/02.html

Britt Blaser

More material on "why we blog"  arrived.  Rebecca Blood - she who wrote the book on blogging - wrote, "…my answer would be much shorter than any of the others you’ve posted: The world is endlessly fascinating. I blog to share the interesting things I find."

Later, I got this note from Lindsay Vaughn:

Why do I blog?   For the same reason I write poetry, learn the Irish language, and make mail art to send out to strangers: because, while none of these activities makes me more functional in the "real world", there is no reason good enough not to.

I blog because I’ve met some fantastically weird and interesting people over the internet and through my four years of blogging, including my husband and some of my closest friends.  I’m also an American expat in Ireland and it can get lonely in the Land of No Yanks.  I blog because nobody listens to me when I speak gibberish in the flesh, but bloggers actually like it, or at least that’s what they say.  I blog because I’m intensely paranoid/scared/angry/on the brink of breaking down nervously, and if I do that here I make less of a gooey mess.

I blog because for as long as I can remember words have been my medium, my escape, and sometimes my downfall.  "Girl, your mouth is going to get you in trouble someday" - she was right.  I’ve lost a job due to blogging and have had to face some seriously pissed off friends and relatives, and still I keep coming back for more.  That’s because I’m a self-centered uncaring cow.  But I’m also thoughtful and kind, somehow.

I blog because blogging has helped me realize how much of an absurdist weirdo I am.

I blog because bloggers make me uncomfortable.  In a yummy sort of way.  Kind of like a big fat chocolate pie that makes you feel so bloated that your trouser buttons are just about to pop off, and you feel a quivering sickness in your gut, and a rising dread in your chest, and the voice of an anorexic floods your mind yelling "No maxi dresses for you!" and all you can do is keep going because nothing in the world is more satisfying than indulging in something you know deep down you shouldn’t be allowed to.

Eat ‘em up!

And Riri, in a comment at the Kitchen, points us to her own recent post on the question, which contains linkage to Vu d’ici:  "10 reasons why blogging is good for you".

Two more emails this morning to add to the "Why do we blog?" compendium.  Terry Frazier says,

I began blogging in the summer of 2024 because I wanted to experiment with this new micro-publishing method discovered while researching cross-media publishing tools. I got some blogging software and started to experiment. It seems to me this period of 2024-2003 was the grass roots heyday of blogging — lots of new blog tools, lots of new bloggers, a new movement was forming.  I made a lot of friends and formed a network of connections I do not believe I could have made any other way.

Today that network stretches, literally, around the world. And I blog to stay in touch with them. I still blog to learn, whether through expanded blog conversations with others or simple technical learning as I play with new tools and techniques. I also blog as a way of sharing what I learn, and for creating a "repository of me" as a courtesy for interested friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. The blog has become the defacto reference point for anyone who wishes to learn about another. If you don’t have a blog, do you really exist? The answer is clearly yes, but I still find blogging useful in this regard.

So there you have it: I blog to learn, connect, experiment, share, and inform. Not bad for a guy sitting around in his pajamas at the computer.

Dave Winer (Scripting News post here) says,

I honestly really don’t know why I blog.

When I started blogging it was mostly to get a bunch of stuff off my plate, ideas I couldn’t do anything with, things I wanted even if I couldn’t create them. I hoped other people would read my ideas and someone would create what I wanted, and therefore increase happiness. Over the years I learned that this very rarely happens. People really want to come up with the ideas, even more than they want to
be successful.

Once I started blogging it got addictive. So the most direct answer would be "I blog because I am addicted to blogging."

I also like the idea that I can have a dinner with people I don’t know in almost any city in the world.