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| Wednesday, December 4, 2002 |
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Reignition 
| | I've thrown a couple logs on Skywave. |
Blog on
I've never felt so deconstructed in all my life
| | It's an outstanding rant, mostly against my apparent (shit, actual) Google dependency. He adds lots other good stuff too. One sample: |
| | For every useful blogger takedown/deconstruction of a virulent bit of "mainstream media" stupidity, there are a dozen bite-sized "my little dog" entries that aren't even always about what people care about as much as they are what people happen to have noticed while seated at their computers. For every useful link or mini-review of a good site, we get dozens of inane shout-outs sent for no better reason than, perhaps, raising one's linkage so Google will notice, so we can blog about Google noticing. |
| | As for his case, here's a long excerpt: |
| | The people who homesteaded the blogosphere (sorry, esr) didn't come to the Web in covered wagons, and it took much less than two centuries for the highways to stretch out from the populous east/meat-space to bring even more settlers to the banks of the (metaphorical) Willamette. In Oregon, the first farmers or their children probably sold dear as the land around them grew crowded, and moved on to the west hills, where their great-great-great-grandchildren sip lattes on the deck, looking down on a city of second-, third- and fourth movers, renters, and bums. Don't see any bums from your uptown loft on the banks of the virtual Willamette? Look under the cardboard boxes. |
| | Is this obsession with Google placement the result of special understandings by a canny early mover in the blogosphere? Insulation against the day there isn't specialness because there are ten billion people on planet Earth and they all blog? Is it a marketer's justifiable concern with how well "Brand Doc" is selling this week and whether it faces dilution at the hands of another Doc? Is it a simple reminder to your readers that outside the pages of your blog, a blog like so many others, you are somebody? Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, and others periodically imply blogging is a loss-leader for the work they can sell: are we being reminded that you've got opinions the unstinting eye of Google, with its implied ad populum valuation of your work, deems salable? |
| | Perhaps these are rude questions, like it would be rude to say "Goddamn you spend a lot of time in front of the mirror!" to a coworker. On the other hand, you're fourth in the rankings when I Google 'weblog.' You're Farmer Searls, and we'll someday remember you on Founders' Day with giant Doc floats and a bronze Doc statue with a coonskin hat. Hell, you tell people whether what they're doing is blogging at all. So you're a subject matter expert, and I'm asking: |
| | What the hell does it all mean? Why do you care? Why do we care? What am I missing? Why don't I Get It? |
| | So: he has questions. I'll have answers, but not much time to give them (breakfast awaits), which is basically my point. |
| | Google makes things easy. Too easy, perhaps. I often mention Google, and what its mirror says, because I can't find (or don't have time or energy to find) anything else. I think, Hey, would you rather have me or my dog? (Well, maybe the dog would be better, since it doesn't exist.) |
| | Blogs are good for a lot of shit. Giving the appearance of vanity appears to be one of them. So does saying nothing about something, and vice versa. |
| | As for What Does It All Mean? Hm. I think of blogs as personal public fireplaces, and every post we make on them as another log on the fire. Google helps us find too many of the logs, then sifts through the ashes for us. You take the metaphor from there. (And be sure to factor in the actually good stuff, too. As Richard Bennett says, on the whole, we're different... a fact without which we wouldn't have anything interestng and mysterious, including blogs.) |
| | Michael asks, ... is its eventual valuelessnes the real racket here? |
| | I think the answer is mostly yes, in the long run. We don't homestead here. We rent. None of us owns one cubic molecule of cyberspace. I rent searls.com from a domain registrar. Dave and Userland (by whose graces I blog here) rent their domains too, including Weblogs.com, where this blog lives. We have no idea what a long run is yet, because we're hardly past the starting line. We live and blog and post and store by the graces of landlords and hard drives, all of which, like all of us, die. |
| | Worse, perhaps: almost none of what we write here is on paper. One fatal glitch somewhere and it's snow on the water. But in a different long run, so is paper. I threw away about half a ton of it last weekend. |
| | So shit, I dunno. But I gotta go eat, and I gotta work after that. See ya later. |
| | [Later...] Okay, here's Kevin politely telling me to GIVE IT A BREAK. He's right. Consider it broken. Let's move on. |
Good to have him back, too
Blogo Mia!
40x my Xmas budget, but the only item on my list
| | My initial impressions? The G3 0wnz. It's faster, the form-factor is more friendly, and the images are pretty darn good. Oh, you need an example? Okay, look at my hungover wife in a medium-lit room without a flash. |
| | Fun 404 on that last link, too. The wife in question, for those not in know, is the smart & lovely Gretchen. |
What got cut off?
| | The funniest story The Onion ever ran was "Anti-Spam Legislation Opposed By Powerful Penis-Enlargement Lobby." I was just going to point RageBoy to it in response to his latest (and very funny) email, but... it seems to be gone. Searches on The Onion using any word in the headline yield lots of funny stuff, but not the desired story. |
| | Fortunately, there seem to be 89 other sites (check out the ads that search digs up) that have kindly pointed to the story. Links forward uselessly to The Onion's home page, but fortunately the top find (in the I'm Feeling Lucky position), is NeuroScooper's, which has all the text. |
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