Here’s a back door around the Journal’s pay-to-play firewall. (Just click on “Put it in Writing”).

[tags]blogging, bloggers, Ronni Bennett, Time Goes By, Wall Street Journal[/tags]

[tags]howard rheingold, vlog, howard rheingold vlog[/tags]

I love Phil Ford’s essay because it refreshes the conversation about the value of the interactivity associated with web publishing. It reminds me that though the meta-conversation around blogging technology may have been diluted by a recent broadening of social software platforms (Facebook, twitter, etc.) and a general disgust with the players in the silly valley blog settings, the creative potential of our medium has only an upside.

Dial “M” has a blogroll that promises to expand access in interesting ways. A recent affectation on the part of a few bloggers who have found their blogrolls to be burdensome in terms of the maintenance they require and the relationships they reflect (Doc!!!) is not imitated here. Indeed, one is hard pressed to imagine any blog with academic intentions that wouldn’t provide sidebar referential information of the type commonly known as “blogroll” (and yes, you can be forgiven for confusing that with some kind of sushi).

The essay emerges from the world of academic musicology, a bubble in the blog foam that has points of tangency with popular culture and the academic treatment of “content creation,” social software, and web publishing. Yochai Benkler gets his links. Here are a couple of passages that may want to make you read the whole thing:

The natural state of the blogosphere is anarchy. The essence of the medium is the reciprocal and nonhierarchical relationship between bloggers and their audiences. In fact, writing about “bloggers and their audiences” is misleading, because it implies that this is a clear distinction of roles, like the distinction between those who read a newspaper and those who write it.

And…

People who complain about blogs, like those who complain about Wikipedia, ask why a medium that puts any random crank on the same footing as an expert should be taken seriously. Defenders of Wikipedia always point out that it’s self-correcting: the damage that malicious and incompetent people cause is quickly undone by dedicated Wikipedians. Now, you can’t quite say this about blogs. A stupid blog post stays stupid. But there is a kind of self-correction at work — call it peer review. The freak who writes ihatealexross.com may get links, but this won’t earn him a place in the minisphere of classical music bloggers. A geek show may get the same pull as a poetry reading, but it’s not as if they have the same clientele: poets don’t have to start biting the heads off chickens. And while one of the charms of blogging is that it allows you to post a long piece of serious writing one day and pictures of your cats the next, a clarinetist who only posts pictures of her cats isn’t going to get any play, except from the crazy cat people. (And that’s a whole different scene.)

…even more…

However, the problem with understanding the musicoloblogosphere as commons-based peer production is that the musicological commons is still very small: for reasons I’ve described, there just aren’t a lot of music-academic blogs yet. But perhaps this is also a secret strength. There aren’t enough music academics to sustain a conversation, but this means that those of us who are in the blogosphere end up spending a lot of time conversing with music people who aren’t academics, or academics who aren’t music people. And the best of them are brilliant: aforementioned critic Alex Ross, pianist Jeremy Denk, composer Matthew Guerrieri, and intellectual critic Scott McLemee, to name only four. And what happens when you spend a lot of time sharing space with these people is that you start to develop a lingua franca, a border language synthesized from the things you have in common. And as I’ve argued elsewhere, that common tongue has its own special characteristics. It is “cool,” in the McLuhanesque sense: readers can profitably interact with it in a wider variety of ways than they can with more traditional forms of academic communication. Blog writing tends to be “porous,” filled with open spaces that readers can fill with their own contributions.

I hope I can be forgiven for pulling so extensively from Ford’s piece. There is plenty more where that came from, juicy prose larded with bons mots and wry observations. If you care about the art of blogging as it applies in any specialized community, take a chance and read the whole thing.

Stowe Boyd,
who has been placeholding my “links” section in the right sidebar [at listics.com] began
an experiment in mindful traffic growth almost three months ago. Stowe
started his /Messages blog with a Technorati rank of 1,088,376 (zero
links from zero sources). Since I’ve been dithering and testing here
for about a year, I actually have 4 links from 2 sites (one of them
mine) and a Technorati rank of 864,574. That’s a head start. Between
now and June 30, I will do what I can to migrate from TypePad to WordPress, from Sandhill Trek rel. 2.0 to Sandhill Trek rel. 3.0 – now at Listics.com

Just as a benchmark the ‘rati data on Sandhill rel. 2.0 are:

Technorati Rank:   9,200 (580 links from 161 sites), or 10,807 (448 links from 142 sites) depending on how you form the URL.  The old Radio blog that saw its last post in December of 2024 ranks  313,538 (14 links from 9 sites).

So let’s call today day one, even though there will be much
hammering and sawing, shouted obscenities, and all the other dust and
background noise associated with building the sets. And let’s see where
we are by mid-summer. I’m sure there will be some cross posting the
first month or so, but ultimately, the goal is to provide a higher
quality blog from a more intentional blogger and cut out some of the
middle-men whose performance problems turn into my own.

[cross posted from listics.com]

Did you hear that Cap Weinberger bit the dust?  There’s a Bohemian Club membership available.

I need a favor.  In return you can ask me for any content you’d like to see on the new the site.  (Cackle… you can ASK!)

I’ve set up the Stat Counter, I think, and I need a few visitors to see if it works.  It’s pretty arid over there… but if you have a moment, please click through to these test links…

link

link

link

(I feel so "Shelley"…)

by clocke/RageBoy®

Hmmm, OK, so Frank… you want to know how I blog. Right? I take that to mean the nuts and bolts stuff. If that’s not what you meant, then tough, because that’s what I’m gonna write about here. And the first thing I’ll tell you is that I’m in a crappy mood. Well, a little crappy. I guess I’ve seen worse. I guess I’ve seen a whole hell of a lot worse, so I should cheer up and get on with it, I suppose. But a little bit grumpy, anyway. So watch it. Don’t fuck with me.

Had to get that out of the way first. I knew you’d understand.

And the second thing is: I sure don’t type into anything like this ugly-ass plain vanilla HTML page. I’m only doing it because I don’t know — how could I? — what you’re going to do with this. So I’m taking pity on you and not linking this up to 32 stylesheets and sticking in all kindsa javascript. (Actually, I just threw in that last part because the only way I ever do javascript is by stealing it and taking about a year to figure out what any 14-year-old whippersnapper hacker can do in three minutes.)

The second thing Part the Second is that I’m very proud to be blogging on Blogspot. That would be Mystic Bourgeoisie, of course. Some folks seem to have nothing but disdain for Blogspot, but here’s why they’re fucked, if I may say so. They’re fucked because Blogspot is free, just as Blogger was free in the Olden Times (or just about; we had to help out Ev if we could, so we ante’d the 25). And that means more people can blog. Lowers the barriers to entry is how we business types would put it. I’m reminded here of how I once wrote: "People often stop me on the street and say, ‘Chris, you’re a successful business-type person. Tell me, how do you…’" But I better not go any further down that road if I expect anyone to ever read this. However, if they don’t like it, well fuck em. That’s what I say. I suppose I should interject here that one thing I do in my blogging — though I don’t know if this would count as nuts and bolts, exactly — is swear a lot. So this is what I like to call Demonstration By Exampleâ„¢ — and that little â„¢ sign there means I’ll sue your ass if you try any copycat cussing.

The point I was trying to make… I am proud of being on Blogspot mostly because I am showing the world (that exceedingly small slice of it that actually reads my shit anymore) that it is not necessary to use one of those ready-made templates they give you. Well no, actually you do use one — pick something dead simple — and then you hack the crap outta that sucker. That’s what I did, yes. On the aforementioned Mystic Bourgeoisie. You bet. I made it so complicated that it took me a month to figure out how to post into it. But you pick these things up. Trust me.

"Do not affect a breezy style," Strunk & White tell us. Well fuck Strunk & White, OK? They never had to blog. And if they had, they’d probably have said all the same things they said back when they wrote that fucking book, and they’d have traffic up the yin-yang. Which is precisely why I hate those sons-a bitches and spit on their graves.

Hey Frank, I should have asked, but… is it alright if I put in some of my various views?

But getting back to business. One thing I should mention is that I switched to the Mac a couple years ago, I guess it was (christ, time flies, does it not?), and as a result, had to rebuild my entire blogging (a.k.a. writing) kit — my heap big mojo-gris-gris shaman spirit bag o’ software tricks, that is to say. (What do they call those damn things? And why does Stephen King have it in for adverbs? He does, if you didn’t know that, particularly.) Anyway, yes, I wrote something for Meg (a.k.a. Michelle, a.k.a. Mandarin Design) about the tools I used to use when I was working on a Windows box. So if you still are, I already wrote that one — employing far fewer digressions, I hasten to add — and it is here.

Hmmm, looking that over, I think perhaps I’ll rip the HTML and try to follow form, only listing Macish tools, instead.

No, I am definitely not going to do that. I just grabbed the code and dropped it in here, and I just about fainted at the work I’d have to do to make it look as good as that looks, and I was getting paid for that one (thanks, Meg). But here’s what I’ll tell you about the tools I use these days, pretty much in the order of how much I use them…

• Amazon – of course
  
  This is where the ideas come from. And the books. And the copyright-freeee grafix! (Big Valuable Hint: if you’re advertising, you’re not stealing.) And where all the money goes. (What money?)
• Google – of course II, The Searching
  
  And its many sub-Googles. Scholar blows, imo — all those damn academic presses that want 29 bucks a pop for a 6-page journal article are clogging the web, the bastards. What’d they ever do for us? But it does have its uses. Better and more fun is Google Books, though I still default to Amazon if they have the full "text" — actually, those damn hidden JPGs. But Gbooks can do some tricks Amazon can’t (yet), so they’re complementary. Froogle, I’ve just learned — duh! — also sells BOOKS! Otherwise, what would I ever use it for? Except to post my wish list.
• BBedit – "it doesn’t suck®"
  
  You need an editor, natch. And this is one of the best. It took me a while to get the hang of it, and it’s a text editor, of course — because that’s what it takes — so it’s uglier’n sin. But I’ve hacked up a bunch of macro sortsa things that enable me to blog three or four hundred words in a mere six hours.
• CopyPaste X
  
  The Mac does suck when it comes to retrieving stuff you deleted yesterday. So does Windows, actually, but there are more tools to get around the problem on that side. CopyPaste is the only damn thing I’ve found that works, and it doesn’t work quite as well as ClipMate (see previously alluded to post). But it works. And to be fair, I should say that it does a whole lot of stuff I haven’t figured out yet.
• Snapz Pro X
  A screen grabber to die for. It’s so cool. I know I shouldn’t put drop shadows on every goddam thing I crop off the screen, but I can’t help myself.
• GraphicConverter X
  I have Macromedia Fireworks on my disk, but I very rarely start it. What does this tell us, class? That’s right. If you’re on a Mac and you work with pitchers, get you a copy. It can do things you’ve never even thought of, probably half of them illegal.
• Transmit
  An FTP client. It’s simple. It works. It’s prettier than Fetch. What do you want? I don’t use Blogger to put graphic files on the web. No, no. I use FTP. I am a professional, after all.
• Camino
  For all you WindowsHeads, this is a browser. And a pretty good one, too. It’s my default web client. Why? I’m not sure. There are things it can’t do, because no one takes it very seriously. Whenever something doesn’t work the way I know it’s supposed to, I know it’s probably Camino’s fault. Why do I put up with this? Because it has a hackable search thing that blows the doors off most everything else. If, that is, and only if, you figure out how to hack it. I did, but I’m not telling. OK, OK, gee, quit crying already. Here, I’ll give you a hint…

  ~/Library/Application Support/Camino/SearchURLList.plist

  But oh mama, watch out for those ampersands!

• iSeek
  If you don’t want to screw around with all that, go here.
• Firefox
  For those "other times" — and to run Gmail in a whole separate app. You know what it is. It’s the browser what’s whuppin Microsoft’s ass. Or at least keeping em good and nervous.
• Gmail
  Do you still need an invite to use this? I don’t know. If you want one, just ask. I put this among blogging tools because I also email (some of) my posts to about 3,000 subscribers — used to be 5,000; see Strunk & White, above — who either a) haven’t figured out RSS feeds yet, or b) haven’t figured out how to get off my list. If you want to try your luck at option b, you can sign up here– then earn extra miles by unsubscribing!
• DigitalColor Meter
  How many times have you wanted to match a color somewhere else on your screen? Somewhere you can’t go with your grafix editor, that is. This little baby is just the ticket. Simple but slick. If you don’t know what it is, you need it. (I just found out, while searching for a URL for this, that it’s an Apple app that comes with the OS. Gee. I did not know that. Of course, there’s nothing about it on the Apple site. That I can find, anyway.)
• Color Consultant Pro – "Point & Click Color Theory"
  I don’t use this one very often, though if you check my various designedly undisciplined blogs, you may come to think I should have. Instant color schemes is what you get. Very nifty. But I mostly just threw this in at the end to look hipper than I really am.

There are probably more, but those are the high points. I think, I read, I think some more, I grab some book covers and some URLs offa Amazon, I cram the lot into BBedit, stir over a low flame for nine hours, season to taste, then FTP the grafix over to panix.com in NY City (!) — which has been comping my site(s) for about ten (10) years now (!!!) [thanks, Alexis] — then I copy the stuff I’ve tested a million and a half times in my magic proprietary local template mockup, then jam the whole works down Blogger’s throat via the web interface. I edit it there another couple hundred thousand times, and voila — another meaningless blog post! Simple.

Look, Frank, you better spellcheck this, dude. It’s already after 9am and I’m too fried. Hope it works for ya.

clocke/RB

Then I got this message from Kombinat!

How do I blog? You seem to be asking about mechanics of blogging? I use
Ecto for Mac posting to Kombinat! I am lazy so I don’t edit. I don’t even check
my grammar and spelling. I just vomit language onto a page in real time. Bada
Bing. There! Language! Sprayed on the page. – And 5 minutes later I might delete
it; or 3 days later I might edit it and sculpt the dried up vomit to make
something out of it. Or I will delete it because it was of no use to what I am
building. Actually I am building something with this blogging I just don’t know
what it is. It’s like hundreds of possible projects and all just sprayed there,
just splattered. I think I actually blog to wake myself up from the ‘agreeable
somnolence’. I write as if it’s not me so when I visit my blog I can read and
say "what kind of a stupid ass wrote this shit" and kind of look for clues to
wake up from the predictability of life. It works sometimes.

But 99% of my time blogging I spend by hanging out on other people’s blogs.
For every 67 posts RageBoy makes I make one. I can read Mike Golby and
Matrullo’s stuff all the time. And of course "wood s lot" is a constant
archeological dig months back. All of it good. All this blogging with time
stamps is really irrelevant. My blogging is all about reading other people’s
stuff from way back. I just read, surf, listen to music, talk on the phone,
that’s how I blog.

I actually noticed that I’ve spent this year splattering lots of comments
at WealthBondage using incomprehensible logic and obscure themes, weaving
personas, digging for gold of human thought. I have incredible allergic
reactions to cliches, to reasonable sentences. I actually developed allergies to
descriptive language and fully formed sentences. Thanks to blogging I finally
have found out that most people write about the same boring shit. So I try to
cut up language into pieces. Hack it. Vomit some verbs. It’s incredibly
refreshing to find people struggling with birthing new conversations. Not
repeating the same old shit but really strugging in saying new sentences
inaccessible to them before. Reading blogs is the new blogging for me. I want to
read stuff that wakes me up. I want to blog stuff that wakes you up; best yet if
it just makes you cry for the lost days of life you will never get back because
you sold your life for daily comfort of ordinary vomit of language running in
your vains. Shit like that you know.

A bit about the mood; I blog when I fight my own desperation. When I deal
with my own cynicism and resignation about life, then I blog, but also when I
love life I blog, a paradox. But hen I am full of opinions I don’t fucking
blog.  It’s dangerous to blog when I am full of opinions. Only shitty stuff
comes out of that. I get fucking cliche attack a ‘look at me how fucking
original I am just like every body else". It also extends to when read something
really really great and I really really want to comment on it and I don’t
because I am afraid I will fuck it up by posting a stupid comment. Actually most
of the time commenting is too much fucking work to tell you the truth. And I
blog usually when I am pissed off about being asleep to life, those are those
rare moments when I know I am just passing through on this planet and fucking up
my life by being reasonable and nice and pleasant and ‘have a nice day’ and
‘would you like fries with that". It happens rarely you know.

Thanks for asking.

Head Janitor of Kombinat!

J. Maybe Elvis

Bada Bing to you too!