I was listening to a radio show a few nights ago, as I was driving home The Connection with Dick Gordon, I'd link to it for you, except I don't feel like googling it to find it. Just think of it like NPR's Talk of the Nation, or the Diane Rehm Show. Same expert and call in format, and it works. I'd listen to music, if the tape player worked or I had a CD player, but NPR is ok, it keeps me awake and thinking. Actually, of those three shows, The Connection is really the best. "This American Life" is my favorite NPR show, even though I never listen to it. How gay is that? Anyway, back to the point.
Right. So they were talking about the impact of blogs on journalism, and how the "blogoshpere" works kind of like a single unity. If gender and psych weren't so interesting, I'd probably want to study social psychology in cyber-culture. Sigh. Why can't you do everything?
Anyway, it was really interesting and the guy Dick had on was really good. Even though he was critical of bloggers, I really liked him. Though the kind of bloggers he was talking about almost seem to have a community more like a message board, but they get some kind of added validity because they "publish" their own work, so it's not just a message board. Except that you have to think of it like a message board.
So I guess I'm not really a bloggers, I mean, I work in a community with other bloggers, and I've been at it for a long time, but I only occasionally comment on current events. If I wanted to read the news, I'd look at the news. I read blogs to know people, even if it's a blog that's about tech stuff or knitting you start to learn something essential about a person. And that's really cool.
Having said that, I come from a different generation of blogging. I remember when moveable type was just a bunch of hype and all the cool people used Greymatter. When the only PHP mySQL options were PHP-Nuke, which wasn't (and as far as I know still isn't) not set up for the kind of one or two person writing teams that I was always interested in. Before Noah moved to California. Hell, I even remember Noah's first (I think) post-MSSAF site.
I remember when Greylogs was the place to be, I remember when PixelPile started. Back then I thought that I was totally the new kid on the block, and in many ways I'm still an outsider, but I've seen a lot.
I started work on the original Collective Arts more than four years ago, (about March). I come from a different age of bloggers I feel some times. If I started CA four years ago, it means Chris and I have known each other for five years. There are really only two people I go to school with who I've known longer and still see and talk to regularly, and a couple that I've known, but don't really talk to. But I digress.
This brings me to the other big accomplishment that's looming large in my future. I turn eighteen in six days. I don't have an Amazon wish list, and I'm not going to link to one even if I did. How's that for bucking from tradition.
Eighteen. I just thought I'd mention it because it's not really real for me yet. I've been so busy. I'm even telling my family and friends to postpone my birthday until the 24th. I'm in a play, and I have a crap load of things to do from my birthday until the 24th.
Anyway, as I was writing this entry I realized that, again, I kind of keep forgetting it. I need to work on that. Back to the entry about metablogging.
So having said that I'm playing with two schools of blogging methodology, if you will. The quick, easy painless method, which blogspot, Type Pad, Live Journal, etc. and hordes of other services now offered. Then there is my own somewhat rambling style, borne partially out of the old school blogs I know and love, and partially out of my own twisted mind. If I'm interested in a subject I can really write forever about it. This entry is now at 720 words. It's the third similarly lengthed entry I've written today. Last weakened, on a whim in a couple of slow hours I wrote 4,500 words about how to manipulate knitting patterns, and associated mathematical conversions. Anyway I digress.
And I don't proof read. In part because my computer would be full of posts that I wrote like this one and then proof read and decide that I didn't like any more. I've done that a lot.
The other thing that I've learned from doing this play, about my writing style, is that I can write colloquially, in a manner similar to the way I talk, and but if I proof read it, I can make anything sound like a history lesson. I get to essayish. Which given that I'm a student and that most of my writing energies are spent writing essays, this is probably an asset. Except that the key to writing an essay isn't sounding like your writing an essay, it's being lively, which most essayists forget, but again I digress.
I'm feeling pretty ADD tonight, can't you tell. Really ADD.
So in case all of you were wondering these are things I'm currently working on in my TealArt writing. This is the point I was setting out to write 950 words ago. deep breath Chris and I have talked about the tone of TealArt a lot, and we seem to have some problems just opening up and talking about stuff, (the day, what's on my mind, etc.) kind of like I've tried to do with this post. The feeling just isn't right. Part of us wants to adapt to modern trends in the blogoshpere (isn't that just a horrible word), and part of us wants to stick to our guns.
Also the fact that we have this bad habit of posting a spurt of message once or twice a month, tends to kind of crimp our the flexibility of the tone. So how to fix this. Unlike my recent bout with Post-modern Stress syndrome. There is quite clearly a possible solution. I'm going to believe that the "just do it, damnit" will work in this case. That is, that if I want the tone and mood to shift so that TealArt relaxes and starts covering a greater variety of subjects, I should just hunker down and start writing more for this.
While I'm at it, it might be interesting to apply this philosophy to a postmodern discourse.