Listics

"The world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and
it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it,
but only when it has become the object of discourse […] We humanize

what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it,
and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human. The Greeks
called this humanness which is achieved in the discourse of friendship
philanthropia, ‘love of man’, since it manifests itself in a readiness
to share the world with other men."
- Hannah Arendt

Zygman Bauman quotes Hannah Arendt in an interview in Eurozine.  Kombinat! pulls that quote forward and owns it.  I follow his links and now I own it too.  We call this hypercapitalist theory.

The official blog of Kombinat! is here.  Today Kombinat! says:

Having No Unified Point of View is ART. Having Paradoxical Moments is
ART. Having Contradicting Arguments All VALID at the same time is ART.
Having NO ANSWER as ANSWER to Continuous Inquiry is ART. Having NO
FUTURE is ART. Having DOUBT is ART. Having PEACEFUL LIFE is ART. Having
CHILDREN is ART. Having CONFUSION about life and LOVING life is ART.
Having SEX is ART. Having NO OPINION is ART.

Go make some ART.

Kombinat! and Madame Levy got buried in the recent TypePad melt-down.  They have serious offerings regarding howBlog.  Skip down a few posts and read them!

When one asks a lot of bloggers how they blog, one must be prepared for the results.  Naturally, I was not.  Prepared for the results, I mean.  Answers to the question came in via email, via comments, via trackbacks, via posts on other sites.  Gathering this material into a few posts won’t be easy.  Acknowledging with kind regards the work of everyone who participates will result in someone being overlooked.  Yet I soldier on, creating content from other people’s work, the consummate editor, hobbled by tools like a spell checker that wants to change "Google" to "Go ogle," facing deadlines, and ultimately responsible for discovering an organizational principle that will make sense of the mountain of information before me.

Thank god for adverbs.  Thank god for Shelley Powers who was unafraid to use a few adverbs in describing just how she blogs.  Shelley says:

Painfully. Sometimes humorously, other times insightfully, here and
there technically or artistically. Too frequently boringly. Lately
though, I blog painfully.

Yet her description, I think, is incomplete because she also blogs "authentically."  Shelley’s voice and purpose are authentic and true.  Here are some other bloggers whose authenticity I find moving:

Read the rest of this entry »

I blog as if there are readers, listeners, viewers… people with whom I am communicating.  I blog as a member of a community. 

I use a few simple tools to create my blog posts.  I have blogged in four different environments, using Blogger, Radio Userland, TypePad, and WordPress.  Inexpertly, I use several packages to prepare post content.  I use

• SnagIt, to grab images from the screen.
• TextPad is a powerful editor that I use to create files that will be placed in the unforgiving window of the blogging tool, the window that has so many times eaten my posts that when I am being careful, when I care about the post I am creating, when that post has more complexity than a simple link to share with others, I create the post offline using TextPad.
• I use Photoshop to optimize and re-size images for inclusion in a post.
• I have a copy of Audacity that I fully intend to use for audio files when I get over my psychological block that has somehow prevented me from using it.  I have a recording of Dervala, and she uses the phrase "posh totty" and that alone should be enough incentive for me to get my ass in gear on this, but alas… something always stands in the way.

For my WordPress blog (hosted on cheap server space I rent from GoDaddy), I also need an FTP client.  WS_FTP Pro is the tool that I use, but any FTP client will do.

Yet I am neither geek, nor nerd.  I am not a hacker, a phreaker, a programmer or any variety of technoid dweeb.  I am a writer.  Weblogging is a medium for capturing my work and for publishing it.  How do I blog?  When I am blogging at my best, the answer is "intentionally."  More often, I blog casually, sharing impressions, trying on ideas to see how they look.

None of this yet speaks to the web services that bubble up and enhance our ability to blog.  Take FlickR, del.icio.us, Bloglines, Google, Wikipedia and the New York Times.  Consider the blogs of dozens of others that every day provide input that sparks creativity, that abrade the consciousness and require response.  Consider the immediate feedback mechanisms that tell us how we’re doing:  the comments and the trackbacks, the feedback provided by Sitemeter or the link data from Technorati.  We blog with all of these providing a context for our work.

During the week to come, I’ll post information from others on these matters.  If anybody wants to tag or follow the tag set that develops, the tag I’m using is howBlog.  I’m organizing this material in a way that makes sense to me.  On Monday, Jeneane Sessum and Rebecca Blood will provide short takes on how they blog.  Jeneane and Rebecca informed my understanding of what blogging was about when I first began "wiggling my fingers on the keyboard."  Throughout the week other voices will be heard, brief comments from Doc Searls and David Weinberger, Shelley Powers and Sheila Lennon.  Dean Landsman will check in, and we’ll hear from literally dozens of others on how they blog. On Friday, Chris Locke closes out the week with a post that takes the top prizes for comprehensiveness, comprehensibility, computronic compo-mentation, and most uses of the word "fuck" in a technical document (2005).  It is simply the gold standard.  It is so good that I couldn’t get the email past the corporate spam filter.   Just as Jeneane and Rebecca informed my understanding of the ethics and community foundation of bloggery, Chris provided an incentive and a model for blogging when I started my first blog with readership greater than one.

I think this will be a fun week, and informational.  I think it will provide tips and tricks and technical insights, and I know it will also provide poetic inspiration.  The posts will run at Sandhill Trek and at Doc Searls IT Garage.  Please join the conversation this week!

Jenny interviews people at Thoughtcast.   Here is a link to an interview with David Weinberger, Stowe Boyd, and Chris Nolan following last month’s Symposium on Social Architecture.

Ross Mayfield has a thoughtful piece ("Freedom of Anonymous Speech") on the social and political consequences of John Seigenthaler, Sr.’s complaint about anonymous misrepresention in Wikipedia.  Seigenthaler, a gentleman whose motives are seemingly above reproach, suffered under the emotional weight of defamatory matter that turned up in his biography on Wikipedia.  Unfortunately, he chose to take his grievance forward in the court of public opinion rather than addressing it in civil court where justice could have been served.

Now, due to the abuse of the Wikipedia contribution process by one anonymous miscreant, the delicate balance of anonymity and attribution on the web is at risk.  I am afraid that the use put to Mr. Seigenthaler’s complaint will result in framing that will harm the "public sphere."  At this point the score seems to be Goebbels - one, Habermas - zero.

Thanks to Doc ("Identity without anonymity is like math without zero") Searls for the link.

With a little help from our friends…

Michelle Goodrich put the logo together at Mandarin Design in a table layout.  Chris Locke captured it as a graphic image using one of the tools he’ll talk about next week.  Frank Paynter stole it because it looks cool and posted it right here on this blog!

Next week, I’ll assemble responses to this question and I’ll serialize them here and at Doc Searls IT Garage.  Meanwhile, I think a little Bo Diddley background music is called for.  And if anyone can find the Doors, the Yardbirds, or the Stones doing this same tune… well, it would be a community service to post the .mp3

How do you blog, how do you blog, how do you blog…

The final difficulty of reading madness […] is that in the act of doing so, one dissociates oneself from it or associates oneself with it, and in either case becomes disqualified as an interpreter. To read madness sanely is to miss the point; to read madness madly is to have one’s point be missed.

— Carol Thomas Neely, "`Documents in Madness’: Reading
Madness and Gender in Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Early Modern Culture,"
Shakespeare Quarterly 42.3 (1991): 315-38, at 316.

Brian Moffatt asks if MoffCasting is blogging or not.  And yes, Brian - I think it really is.  It is more than blogging in fact.  The way you do it, I will listen again.

And speaking of audio-files… here’s a big shout out to Sheila and Mike!

A year ago I assembled a lengthy
post that addressed the question, “Why do you blog?”   About three dozen
bloggers participated and the information was well received.  That post can
still be found at

http://sandhill.typepad.com/sandhill_trek/2004/11/why_do_we_blog.html

There’s another question that I hope
people will be interested in answering.  I am sure that others will be
interested in reading the answers:

How do you blog?

There’s as much latitude possible in
the answer to the HOW question as there was in the WHY question, and rather than
lead you in one direction or another, from tool sets to formal pajama wear, I’ll
just leave it open-ended…

How do you blog?

I’ll appreciate emailed responses
and/or links to posts at your sites where you address the
question.

While our culture is beset with twee re-interpretations of what constitutes good manners and whose ideas may belong to whom, the ground rules here are simple.  If you’ll send me an email, I’ll probably post it.  Unless you ask to be anonymous, I’ll attribute it to you.  I may edit it for length or content and you just have to trust me not to mess it up too bad.

Frank Paynter

fpaynter [at] sandhilltech.com