Topical Blogging
I’ve been resisting being lumped into a coherent blogosphere (Ack! The first time I’ve used that bastard word). I’ve also resisted the urge to consider my blog as topical, though people who have read me a while will know that I focus on matters of word and image, that is when I’m really blogging rather than avoiding writing what I really should be writing. You can always tell when someone is really avoiding—they start metablogging.
But a post from Simon Willison made me think. From the standpoint of coherent information technologies, topical blogging is best. It allows people to locate information they can use quickly. However, this could be death to the concept of a blog as a “friendly” space. You don’t choose your friends based on what they know. You choose them because of common attitudes, attitudes that are hard to quantify. My blogroll is a mess. It’s always been that way. I like it. Simon Willison was on there because I was teaching a class in web writing, and he was a good way to keep up on interesting technology sites that I could use for the class. My interest was topical, not personal. Many blogs are on my blogroll for that reason, nothing more. It isn’t a vote of confidence, or a gesture of friendship, or anything of the sort.
Other blogs are there merely because I like the way that the people think. It doesn’t have anything to do with common interests. Blogs come and go on my blogroll unceremoniously, because my attention shifts. Blogrolls are a convenience for me, not a networking device—though there are several groups of “nodes” there that I feel strongly connected with. They are, in a profound way, friends. But I seldom make it explicit who the friends are, where the fascinations lie, or where the interest is purely topical. Topical would be really be convenient. But then, logging onto my own blog would be more like opening an encyclopedia rather than thinking.
My thinking is usually chaotic and unstructured. So is my blogroll. So is my site. It is a service to me, not anyone else. I’m okay with other people visiting, but I’ve never felt it important to seduce anyone into visiting with by brilliance and easily accessible insights. No, this place is rather wrinkled and messy. Just like me.
You also know that you’re really avoiding your thesis when the house gets clean. It’s pretty scary around here.
Your blog is the one of the least “wrinkled and messy” of all the blogs I’ve ever read. My grandmother always hated going to very nice houses. One of her sons married a woman who is a very talented decorater and keeps a perfectly spotless house and she (my grandmother) always complained that when she visited them she was afraid to touch anything because she might mess something up. That’s sort of the way I feel about commenting here – like I’M too wrinkled and messy.
Anyway… I apologize for the rambling. I have such a long blogroll that I have to put it on a separate page. My links page is mainly for my own use though I’m happy if others find something worthwhile there. I’m a packrat. I link to sites that I find interesting for one reason or another. Later if I lose interest, or even if they say something I find a little offensive, I still find it very hard to remove someone from my blogroll.
Dear Mr Jeff
Re your penultimate paragraph: I am going to take your penultimate paragraph, embroider it in cross-stitch as a sampler, and hang it over my blog somewhere.
Re your ultimate paragraph: yikes. How’s the garden (if any) looking? Avoidance activities can have such attractive side-effects.
One of my chief goals when I began an online journal was to promote the pleasure of random browsing, since it seemed to me that technophiles and copyrightwingers alike were working as hard as they could to eliminate it, what with targeted marketing, preselected networks of people who match you as closely as possible, access restricted to those who have “proven scholarly interest”, and on and on into the hall of mirrors.
Providing a corrective may not have been one of your chief goals when you started, but it’s certainly been among the “attractive side-effects” of your approach.
I like wrinkled and messy. Neat makes me nervous. And of course blogs and blogrolls should be personal. This ain’t no encyclopedia!