save as draft

I have lots of half finished notes sitting as partly written entries on this blog, it would seem that I'm not alone, a quick peruse of other peoples' blogs in NetNewsWire confirms this. MT has become the equivalent of the notebook, sort of, it doesn't capture everything, as it is not always with me.
Earlier in the year I wrote about how I had replaced my palm pilot with a sheet of paper, well it has been upgraded to a Moleskine, which I bought whilst in Grenoble recently. I've started to use it for capturing the inital "I might write about X thoughts". Todo lists live on as scraps of paper folded inside, and some travel writing fills the front, though I usually spend too much time staring out the window on trains and not writing.
Maybe the choice of notebook was inspired by Bruce Chatwin, who I'm reading at the minute, or maybe practicality. Whatever it is a useful medium to have, of all the notebooks cluttering up my flat I find that this is the right size for me to want to carry and not regret the size of it.
Chatwin's writing feels like weblog articles, you can see the constraint of the page size in his writing, each chapter is a couple of pages from his moleskin, the standard paperback page size dwarfs the writing at times. His writing also has the same immediate style, capturing the sights and the experiences straight onto paper. It is the immediacy that feels like weblogging drawing you into the periodic snapshots of his travels in Patagonia. It might just be that I've read few literary diaries, but the parallel is too strong for that I think.
So, back to the drafts, I still have them sitting on my server and I'm not sure what to do with them, some of them are interesting, others dated. I'm tempted to delete them and more on. Yet there is something of interest in them, maybe I'll roughly edit them and dump them on here.
Bruce Chatwin may have had a similar experience or half finished entries, yet working the linear medium of the Moleskine, he was much more constrained in terms of returning to unfinished work, this might be a good discipline to learn. Often the more quickly written articles are more popular than the longer missives I labour over, like this one is turning into.
On Monday night I spent a while talking over some of this with Tom, Euan, Paul and Dan, amongst others. Stuart Hughes talked about his experience of blogging in Iraq, then recovering from his injuries. He also touched on the differences between his day job as a journalist and his writing on his weblog. They are not the same thing, but the news media are interested in the freshness of weblogs, but the randomness of them in terms of fact checking makes them wary. The mainstream media prepare news for consumption, those who read blogs make their own narrative.
This lead into a debate on the changes that happen to a weblog if you write for an audience, or to get traffic. There is a continuum from niche blogs like gawker or pvrblog, to the more personal weblogs like this one. I write pretty much what I want, occasionally being sensitive to being a BBC employee, in that I don't blab about non-public projects, but that is not a BBC specific thing. Once you have an audience however small, it is difficult to ignore them, hence the occaisional apology for not posting that appears on various blogs. There is also the passing desire for fame via google and affiliate income from amazon or such, mind you the rates of pay are pretty low in terms of pounds per entry, even NUJ basic rates are better.
This desire to capture the passing flow of information and distill it is quite powerful, hence the linklogs that people have, this is a good example. There is a part of me that wants to make a linklog, in fact I've started one, which I've yet to link in to the main page. Yet links without context make me feel a bit sad, as they are just like bookmarks, which I seem to have stopped using altogether. I feel that I'll loose the context in which I found the link in the first place, again I've talked about this before.
Finding time to write enough articles to capture the world as it passes you by is important, maybe having the moleskine and the linklog will let me focus on the more interesting articles and "bookmark" the rest. There is also a balance between work and play, though arguably this is both.
Weblogs increase the amount of information you can read, RSS readers enhance this ability even more. Maybe I'm saying that reading less and maybe writing less might be a good idea, or at least letting go of some of it.