Seems like Montreal’s blogging scene is as active as ever, this month. Scary! 😎
First, on Wednesday, March 7, at 8p, yulblog First Wednesday (monthly meeting, at Quincaillerie on Rachel near Parc Laf). Then, on Friday, March 16, at 5p, Blogging Book Launch at the RJ microbrewery on de la Roche (near my place).
Hey, blog-brothers and sisters!
Feel free to put a plug to your blog, here. Doesn’t even need to rhyme.
Got the idea from YULBlog last night and thought it might be neat. (Besides, it’s a shameless attempt at getting more comments and/or pings.)
Otherwise, if you came for stuff about craft and homebrewed beer, homeroasting and other coffee geekery, or musical diversity, do browse and comment.
I also have two blogs on music. One for a course in the anthropology of music, the other Thinking Globalisation Through Music.
Though it might not seem so obvious, I’m longing for comments… 😉
Ethnography of bloggers, ethnography through blogging, blogging about ethnography… English is cool for ambiguity, even though many English-speakers follow a Gricean language ideology.
Woohoo! We’re back on, baby!
Technorati Blog Info: Disparate
Mysteriously, this here main blog of mine wasn’t getting updated in Technorati’s famously unreliable databases. For about six months, my new posts and incoming links weren’t showing up. It now works. So, that’s cool.
Not that it’s likely to bring me traffic or to increase my ranking somewhere. But it might bring me more of the attention from cool people that some entries have garnered me, on occasion. Call me vain all you want (anyone who discusses blogging eventually calls some bloggers vain, it seems) but there’s something fun about getting noticed if you eventually get to contribute something back. Usually, non-blog tribunes work better for me to achieve those goals. Mailing-lists are especially good, for me. Or, possibly, forum comments.
Actually, the problem might be that blogging is still not a very natural thing for me to do. And my writing habits are possibly incompatible with blogging culture (though, not with the nature of blogging).
Still, blogging has been fun. Technorati might even make it a little bit more fun.
Who knows, maybe some people will eventually comment my posts… 😉
As I notice that provocative and opinionated pronouncements are more likely to garner feedback than carefully crafted balanced thoughts, I’ll say it like this: bloggers should think before they blog! :-S
What I really mean to rant about is that the part of blogging I dislike the most is time-sensitivity. Knee-jerk reactions are great for blogging and I do believe in RERO. But there’s a point at which people seem to care too much about posting at the right time. Some even want to be the first person to blog a given issue. Is it the blogging equivalent of scooping??
Ok, ok, I’m about as guilty as anyone else. Partly because I have long lists of things I want to talk about and there are some cool streams of consciousness effects in the bringing of current issues in the same conversations. This is, in fact, where blogging is most interactive, IMHO.
Sheesh! Can’t people just think, once in a while?
Blogging is fun. Among the neat effects of blogging is that, though bloggers aren’t at all alike, they tend to be “like-minded people,” despite striking individual differences.
Cases in point, from last night.
Went to an event organized through Montreal Linkup, an event organisation system with obscure ties to Craigslist. At one point Saib, one of the participants, was talking about a blog post he had read. Turns out, he was describing my ramblings (and open letter) about Montreal culture and the Linkup system. I did feel quite proud. Not that he had read my post (or that he remembered anything about it), but that the post had exactly the kind of effect I wanted. Though blogging can feel awkward in my case, and I often feel like I’m writing in a vacuum (for several reasons, feedback to my entries has been extremely limited), it leads to those situations where different parts of your life are linked.
Also present at the Linkup event was Shiraz, a fellow YulBlogger. Thanks to the Yulblog Confessions from the August YulBlog gathering, I had went on Shiraz’s blog and even used her technique of blogging different topics in the same post, right here. Before the Linkup event, I didn’t know Shiraz personally, but chances are now that we might link to each other.
Which is a major issue among bloggers. Been thinking about it myself, thanks in part to Sylvain Carle (yet another YulBlogger). And it has influenced my blogging philosophy (whether I notice it or not). No wonder network analysis has been growing steadily. (Man! Do I love putting my academic hat in the middle of my ramblings…)
On occasion, I will insert as many outgoing links in my blog entries as possible. Several reasons for this practise, including the fact that it’s easier to find links if they’re on my blog. But there might be more of a wish to get comments from other bloggers by teasing them with links to their blogs (thanks to pings and trackbacks).
Yes, posting about blogging is allegedly uncool, and linking to your own entries seems silly. But I’m having fun doing this… 🙂
In fact, if you think this whole blog is lame, do comment here! 😉
As WLW seems to be the first standalone blog editor to support Blogger Beta, a short test is in order.
Although, I do prefer Qumana and ecto, at least for the interface.
One thing that we really need is a blog tool that has access to our browser histories. That way, we could quickly insert links directly from the editor.
A friend sent me this link:
How to Dissuade Yourself from Becoming a Blogger – WikiHow
Cute, but not that insightful. Continue reading For Those Who Don't Grok Blogging
Blogspot Does Not Scale With My Life at A Fool’s Wisdom
My comments:
Blogspot isn’t perfect and WordPress is quite good. But Blogger beta does have some redeeming qualities, including category-like labels. The advantage these labels have over WP categories is that labels can be sorted by frequency instead of being listed alphabetically. Also, you can simply type a comma-separated list of keywords and these will be added as labels. The full list of labels is available but it’s hidden by default. With WordPress.com, adding categories can be an issue. It actually takes time to do on my decent DSL connection. In terms of basic reasoning, WP categories are really categories (you classify posts). Blogger’s labels are more like labels, tags, or keywords: you specify what your post connects with.
While it’s true that Blogger beta doesn’t have an export feature yet, other blogging systems should be able to import Blogger entries, once the new APIs are released. In fact, the cool way to do it, IMHO, is to use a standalone editor like ecto to repurpose your posts. Since the new APIs for Blogger haven’t been released, ecto can’t download Blogspot entries, but it’s certainly going to be a possibility quite soon.
Since Blogger accounts are quite common, commenting on somebody else’s blog can bring more comments to your own blog. WP.com tries to do the same thing and the tag surfer is quite cool, but so far comment traffic on my blog has been very low.
The other thing that is nice about Blogger is that, contrary to WordPress.com, it’s not a simplified version of a full package. WordPress makes a visible effort to add functionalities to WP.com (WP MU) but it’s still meant as a way to push people into WP. Installing WordPress is very easy and anyone with server space should use it on their own server. (That’s what we do for our <a href=”http://blog.criticalworld.net/”>academic blog</a>.) But for those who don’t have server space, WP.com can be slightly frustrating as the documentation, forums, community, plugins, and neater features are really meant for your own WP installation.
Now, don’t get me wrong. WP.com has been quite nice to me in the past few months. In fact, my main reason to move from WP.com to Blogger would be if my Blogger/Blogspot blog got more comments than my WP.com one. Otherwise, unless Blogger comes with very compelling features (like integration with Google Measure Map, Calendar, Spreadsheet, Writely, Gmail, etc.), my WP.com blog will remain my active blog.Thanks for your comment on my blog!!
Weeeeee!
My, oh my!
It might be the Back to School mood, or it might be something (I was advised to write more, for personal reasons) but it seems like I’m going through an intense blogging phase!
Man!
You know what? It feels gooood!
Several of my latest entries were in fact drafted a while ago.
And this one is a collection of short entries that could have been expanded entries.
Late August Quickies
So, all of these aren’t new entries. But publishing them helps me in many ways. As silly as it may sound, these drafted entries were starting to become a burden on me. So, publishing them feels like lifting that burden. This feeling is behind many people’s “to do” lists. My mother talks about that feeling you get when you cross out an item in your “to do” list. It’s hard to describe but it’s easy to understand if you’ve ever felt it. In my family, “to do” lists are called “vélo (faire du),” an example of our oikolect. It comes from the French “bike (to do).” My older brother noticed that item on one of my mother’s “to do” lists lying around and found it pretty funny. It stuck. My family also has a term for the opposite of procrastination, “fullfur” (/fUlfyr/ in IPA). It comes from English “full,” which has been used by young French-speakers in Eastern Quebec to mean pretty much the same thing as “totally” as used by U.S. youths, and “au fur et à mesure” in French, which means pretty much the same thing as English “as you go.” Both of these terms go well with my family’s ideas about time-management. Not that we all follow these ideas. But I have been enculturated into these ideas.
Anyhoo (!), back to blogging sprees.
They’re quite therapeutic. Maybe because they stimulate da buh-rain.
And I notice a number of things about writing and blogging strategies. Seems like blogging really works best if it’s kept spontaneous. But going back to previous entries can be pretty satisfying too.
There’s pretty much no reason to wait before posting an entry. RERO!
As I expected, writing a lot without too much self-censorship really helps to develop writing abilities. Not I’m necessarily that proud of my writing but I do write a lot and some people have complimented me for my writing style. Especially as a non-native speaker of N-guh-lish.
Editing can be easy and fun if enough time has passed since the last revision. It can be a b*tch when it’s done right away.
The entries I’m most proud of (yes, there are some) don’t tend to be the most read ones or the ones garnering comments. But they feel really good to write. In a way, the fact that they’re not read so much encourages me to stay humble, which is helpful to any writer.
Linking is fun. So is playing with categories/labels/tags. Actually, it’s quite likely that nobody notices my use of categories as counterpoint to my entries, but I do it for fun anyway.
My growing obsession with getting more comments might die out pretty soon. And as soon as it does, I will be getting so many comments that I’ll have to moderate my blogs!
There’s a chain reaction or domino effect to blogging. You write about one thing which makes you want to blog about another thing, etc. So you go on a blogging spree during which you want to post 25 entries a day. Eventually, your blogging fervor peters out and you only blog a few times a month. It’s quite likely that getting comments has a large influence on whether you’re on a blogging spree or not.
Given the way blog entries are read, it doesn’t seem to matter much if an entry’s structure is tidy or “chevelue.” Good thing too as my thoughts tend to be pretty scattered. (Yes, really!)
Erm, and, it’s actually hard to press that publish button, sometimes.