Snow
Recently in writing Category
The title of some email spam I was sent recently, I wonder at what scale of live it would make sense. Hydrogen is after all pretty damn tiny, making nanotech seem vast. Bosons and quarks fighting it out over who really is the god particle ?
Hi Macworld reader, I wrote the feature on blogging in the current issue of Macworld UK, I hope you enjoyed it. However things are a bit quiet here currently, lots of plans and less time. At the bottom of the page are some people I'd recommend reading and there are also links to my archives. Hope you have fun !
Recently I have found a new creative outlet to take my mind off the list of things going on in my life. From belt sanding the 300 sq foot floor of our bedroom, to the US election, product design pressures in work, the european constitution project I'm working on and the inevitable UK election and whether I can vote for Labour in the spring.
My new outlet is what is commonly called haiku, though often disparagingly. In fact mostly people write senryu. The key difference being haiku are about nature and include specific words to reflect season, the senryu are about human foibles.
Further references on haiku cover the life of Basho, one of the foremost masters of the art. There are a range of site covering the art haiku.com and Japanese site, the wikipedia definition. This is a lovely site, with some nice illustration, as is this one.
It is a thoughful pastime usually consisting of 3 lines and 17 syllables distributed in 5, 7 and 5. The intent is to capture or indicate a moment, a fleeting sensation usually of nature. My first efforts represent the lovely light from October.
dramatic light
veering sideways makes faces
glow as autumn leaves
More as I write them. The wonderful moleskine is the tool for writing haiku / senryu in, as they are perfect for writing on the train. Saves reading some tabloid over someone else's shoulder or feverishly typing on your powerbook.
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.
Vic prompted me to search out the meaning of the satisfying word petrichor and in doing so I discovered the interesting Weird Words website. Hours of entertainmen and enlightenment. I've used gobos and of course i like a bit of shenanigans.
I've got lots of stuff backing up in my head, with things to write about and thoughts I've had whilst on holiday. I've even got a long entry on Venice to finally finish and several books to write about. Yet everything feels stuck in my head and going stale.
Euan links to an article about writing your blog, it is not a technical thing you learn, to improve you need to experience so that you have something to write about.
Peter Lindberg writes perfectly about my feeling, holding on to the ideas that you want to blog makes them ferment. Blogging is like breathing, if you hold your breath it isn't good for you. He follows up with a note on Chris Pirillo about not forcing it, if there is nothing to write about then don't. I think I agree, if I have nothing to say then I usually leave it or read something, I need some stimulus to have a reaction to. Though if I don't post for a while, like having come back from holiday it can take a while to get back into it. Hence I was back on late Thursday and only now am getting back into the swing of it.
Making time to write is something that many authors say is important, you need to get into the habit of it. I don't want to create a linklog, I want to actually have some of my own content on here, mainly to satisfy myself and track what I'm reading or thinking or doing. Today marks four months of my blog being public to the world and I think it might be taking its first steps and looking forward to being one.
Congratulations to Ben and Mena Trott, who are SixApart, the people behind Moveable Type which powers this site, have got funding and are launching a new hosting service called Typepad. Ben Hammersley got the scoop and wrote about it in The Guardian. TypePad will be perfect for those people who want to blog, but want more than blogger offers and can't be faffed with setting up their own server or learning linux, it should make for less geeky writing and even more widespread RSS feeds too, (I've already got 111).
Though as Tom Coates notes, there is a new blogger coming. Screen shots and a preview are linked from the site.
Finally NetNewsWire should be public beta 1.02 next week, look at the end of the post. Congrats to Brent for getting the award too.
I've been thinking about the different styles of blog writing and their differences from other writing styles, such as journalisim or academia. Partly as a reaction to the James Moore vs Andrew Orlowski discussions, see also Joi Ito on this topic.
I was discussing it with Anno and she mentioned comonplace books or scrapbooks, as her analogy for weblogs. I think that there is quite a bit to that, but am interested in other areas too.
Various people have boldly claimed that weblogs are the new journalism, I don't agree, journalism has several differences, It has an organisational voice, it is edited, it is often news only in its focus. I think that there are some parallels with academia, given the liberal use of citation or linking. Kevin Marks noted that webloggers link to their sources and some have an idea of fair representation, I feel that this is probably due to the amount of rapid peer reviewing to which you can be exposed.
However sometimes it feels a bit like Radio4 or NPR and creating short radio documentaries, pick your new topic of interest write some stuff and link in your sources.
I guess it depends upon the style you write in, some a more lists of links, like old style homepages, others are more considered essay writing only posting occasionally. For me it is somewhere between essay writing and a scrapbook. There is also a strong element of collaborative authoring to weblogs, commenting and trackback features turn it into a distributed community discussion forum.
This leads to a couple of things, I can assess one particular person on the basis of their writing and I can get to know and trust even people who I have never met, it is stronger relationship than I might get via a mailing list. Euan points to Sébastien Paquet discussing trust. This trust helps build social networks and it is these networks that help to form some of the social capital that I've been disucussing in relation to the cultural differences articles I wrote earlier in the month. Ross Mayfield has an interesting analysis of social capital and how it relates to weblogs, showing that weblogs allow different levels of social network at different levels of scale, rising from collaboration to communication to publishing, he says that we are now in the network age, which I'd agree with. Certainly I get a slight irritation when some people don't have a blog, a bit like some people used to not have an email address or mobile / cell phone number. I want to know them better or what to have the same kinds of conversations with them as I can with others.
The style guide from the Guardian provides an interesting read on where they are taking the English language, they recommend dropping hypens and ie is two letters. There is lots of information on these pages, with about 20-30 entries per letter.
