Category: Bloggers and blogging
From now on I’m going to try to put something up here every day
Yes. Something. Very possibly something short, or trivial, or banal, or just plain stupid. But something.
I do not believe that it is an unbreakable law of blogging that all bloggers must update their blogs every day. Some of the blogs to your left remain unaltered for days and even weeks on end. But I already know from experience that this something-each-day rule works well for me. I can do something every day, usually with no inconvenience. On the other hand, if I let the days go by, the obligation to resume with a splash instead of just a plop causes a feedback loop of delay, which I do not enjoy. So I am being entirely selfish here.
Also, my best writing is probably done in phrases and sentences, rather than in long, carefully thought out paragraphs and essays. These good fine phrases and good sentences are just as likely to be provoked by obligatory postings – “quota” postings, as I sometimes call them – as by things I feel an inner compulsion to say. Anyway, inner compulsion is overrated.
If there are interruptions, I will try to flag them up beforehand.
Please note the word “try” in the above, twice, and again in the title. As always, I promise nothing. You get what you pay for.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Giving the blogs what they want
I have just posted a bit on Samizdata about the failure of “Khubilai” Khan to conquer Japan. His entire invasion fleet sank in a typhoon, in what was apparently the greatest naval disaster ever.
This posting was originally submitted for publication at the Globalization Institute Blog, but it was rejected for being off message. It would, said GI boss Alex Singleton, stick out like a sore thumb. So what’s not global about a Mongolian battle fleet sinking, on the other side of the world, and being on the telly in one of those documentaries with actors who don’t say anything so the voice over can be in any language? As we used to say in a Restoration comedy I once acted in at Essex University: Pshaw.
This posting is not me trying to start a campaign, or anything foolish like that. Alex is paying me for GI Blog postings and as far as I am concerned he is entitled to reject what I send, no matter how irrational and wrong-headed his explanation or with no explanation at all. I believe in blogger sovereignty. So instead, I quickly did another piece about child labour.
I am now being paid to contribute, once a week, to four blogs. There’s the GI blog, and the ASI blog, and two of the CNE blogs. (See also the list on your left.) Last Sunday some people said to me: What do you do? By which I took them to mean: What do you get paid to do? And for the first time in my life I said: I’m a writer.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
I now have a blogroll
Yes, alert the media, I have a blogroll.
The reason this is the kind of news that ought to stop the world’s newspapers and television news teams from obsessing only about those silly bomb explosions on the London Underground is that throughout all the time when I was ranting away on Brian’s Culture Blog and Brian’s Education Blog (concerning which more anon) I never had a proper blogroll on either. Well, there was something vaguely like a blogroll on the Education blog, but it included many blogs I hardly ever read, and omitted many others, on account of me never updating it properly.
But there was a more fundamental problem, closely related to why I decided not to try to revive these two separate blogs, which is that I never knew exactly where to put my blogroll. My real one, I mean, the one with the blogs I constantly read. Take 2 Blowhards, for example. A culture blog, right? Well, yes, mostly, but they often had good stuff about education. So where did I put them? Did I put them in both blogrolls. Did I have a separate blogroll to which each blog would link, and if so how the hell does that work? Who do I ring to sort that out? Too much, as the great Chuck Berry sang, monkey business.
So, of course, in the end I just did nothing and let the whole situation fester. Nobody seemed to mind very much, except me. Me, because I was the one who had to whistle up google every time I wanted to read some blog I had forgotten that I liked, on account of not having a blogroll.
But, now that I only have one blog, the question of where to shove my blogroll answers itself.
What does not answer itself is how to pick them, and what order to put them in. At present, to avoid any more meaningful classification, I have simply gone with alphabetical order.
But even that method has problems. At the moment, The Big Blog Company comes just before The Hole, because the Thes, I have decided, count. If The is in the title of the blog linkee, then it begins not with B or H (as in the case of The Big Blog Company and The Hole) but T. All the blogs starting with The come just after Terrible Rubbish and just before TortureBlog. (I made those up.)
I used to be rather scornful of pop combos who called themselves Pox, instead of something like The Pox Brothers, or whatever. I mean, if the definite article was good enough for The Beatles and for The Rolling Stones, then it ought to be good enough for Oasis, but apparently it isn’t. But I probably only thought this because, being a classical fan, I never really bothered about arranging my pop music in order by name of artist. My pop just sat in a random heep, or now in a random clutch of CDs, arranged chronologically, if at all. If I had ever wanted to arrange pop musicians in alphabetical order, I would have thanked heaven for Oasis, Pox, Misery, Abba, Mud, Mouthwash, Young People These Days, Queen, Carbon Monoxide, Eurotrash, Our Daughter’s Wedding (which I did not make up by the way – that one is real) etc., and cursed The Compost Removers, The Pasadena Roof Orchestra, The Gay Communist Twats, The Exterminators, and yes, even The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. And don’t get me started on The The. As it is, I am facing this The problem for the first time, and it is a knotty problem I can tell you.
There is lots more I could say about my blogroll. But there is lots I could say about Concorde which I have never said and never will, so I see no particular problem about stopping this posting here.