Well, I think I'm done here. My site is working nicely, even if I don't post enough, so I now officially declare this blog closed. It'll stay up, of course, if only so I can laugh at my old writing if I ever get famous.
Shannon, you are to be congratulated. A coupleof words and you keep me posting daily for over two weeks. Still, everything comes to an end after a while. I've finally realized what I should have a long time ago, I suck at blogging. I can barely keep up regular posting, run out of steam easily, think every entry should be written for the ages (not that I'm any good at it), and quickly get an 'I could care less attitude' after reading too much news for a few days.
With that in mind, I quit. Forget regular posts, anything like that. When I post I'll do it on something that really does catch my eye, and if I don't show up for a while I won't be dead, just enjoying one of the many other aspects of my life. No more nasty one line, Instapundit-like posts either. I hate that guy.
And this blog is also dead, but you probably knew that. The new domain seems to be working well, got the Greymatter publishing thing working nicely, if a bit plain. (And it's free too) I'm still working on it though, probably won't have it ready to go for a week or so. I'll make an announcement here when it's ready, and then start the whole blogging thing anew over there.
I'm lazy, but you already knew that. I'm opening up the guest account now because I don't feel like getting up at midnight and going to school on 5 hours of sleep.
Anyway go to blogger.com, log in with the account name 'iamaguest' and the password 'freefriday'. Click on the nice green cross and write yourself some words. Anyone is welcome, and I hope some new people stop by so I can add you to the blogroll.
Have fun, knock yourself out. Excessively obscene entries are subject to censorship, but I doubt I'll mess around with anyone's posts otherwise. Most importantly, sign the post and give a link back to your site (if you have one) so I can track you down after I read your brilliant writing.
Did I mention I was a computer science major. Yeah, sorta. Only, I haven't taken any actual computer courses, just poked around through the basics. And going language crazy this semester hasn't helped much.
Why does this matter? Because I just got my domain about two hours ago. The clever, inventive, subtly amusing name of jshanks.com. How original and clever, eh? Still waiting for the thing to propagate, but I'm uploading a few scripts to see how things work.
Enough of that, though. Meet a little site called postsecret. Lots of people send anonymous postcards with a confession to an address. It is then posted publicly online. The idea is that this "taps into the part of each of us that needs to share; to confess."
Or the part of us that likes to pull people's legs. Still, neat to watch.
Behold, the second bimonthly Free For All Friday approaches. It's supposed to be the last friday of every month, but you know.. stuff happens, and I never got around to it in December.
Never more, however. The lazy person that I am has discovered how hard it is to actually come up with even one post a day, as low as my standards are. I welcome any and all opportunities to get out of work, and look forward to dumping some of it on you.
This isn't making sense to you? Hmm, a little background then. Free For All Friday is a..
"unique blogging meme - it isn't about what you post, but what others post for you. You participate by allowing the general blogging public the ability to post on your blog via a guest account. As the blog owner, you get to set the guidelines - but it IS called Free-For-All for reason. FFAF is a tremendous opportunity to get to know your readers while they get to know you."
OrangeHairedBoy gets a little fancy with his words, but it's pretty simple, you come by on Friday, or 11:47pm Thursday, and log into the guest account with the handy dandy password I'll give you. You post anything you want, without making every other word one of them four letter ones. And best of all, after finishing up, you get to put a little link back to your blog, so the three people who read this thing regularily can come see yours. You, uh, do have a blog, right?
I'm thinking of moving away from BlogSpot. Unfortunately, I have a couple of problems. I'm an empty pocketed cheapskate, I'm too lazy to really buckle down and figure out CGI scripts and all that, and I have so many things I ought to be doing instead of blogging.
Still, delusions of grandeur keep coming up. And, I might have found the right place to use them, or at least leave them to die. DragonFort.net is a new hosting service setup by a Michigan college student that offers reasonable service, and for only a dollar. Yes, that's what I said. You get 300mb of server space and 10Gb of bandwidth a month. And it's only a dollar.
The guy seems nice enough, talked to him this morning on AIM. Apparently he works for this ISP in the summers, but they don't pay him, just give him server space. I know I get what I pay for, but it's a good place to test things out. Besides, if it goes under I lose what, 12 dollars?
One problem though. I need a good domain. I'm not sure if I want to transfer the liberalartsstudent line up to the big leagues, since it's a bit for people to remember and they're likely to forget the double S. The domains I could think up in the last 3 hours, johnshanks.com, allo.com, mediocracy.com, stickinthemud.com, cheesy.com, whee.com, and arggh.com are all gone. MyBlogAteMyHomework.com is available, but that might be a bit too long.
Whadya think? Any suggestions? Winning submitters will receive the gratefulness of a mediocrat and three blogs on the subject of their choice, not to mention an indepth interview via their IM program of choice. Apply now, win prizes, show them off to your friends. Mail to johnshanks [AT] gmail.com.
With the end of the Blogging Journalism & Credibility conference, I'm reading through the posts, trying to digest it all. It's very interesting and has a lot of good lessons, it'll probably become part of my blogging bible along with Evangelical Outpost's How To Start a Blog Series
I do, however, disagree on one point, the characterization of the "wingers" as a problem. In this post, filed on the 22nd, Jon Garfunkel talks about his impressions of the first day. He comes up with a breakdown of the blogosphere into three groups.
We can speak as the blogs, bloggers, and the blogosphere as it had a stable definition. Except of course when these are criticized, people drop back into “blogs aren’t just one thing!”
So here’s how I break down the types of bloggers: Ringers, Stringers, and Wingers.
THE RINGERS
These are journalists who are now bloggers– apparently, the best authorities on this subject (cf. religious or party conversion) In addition, your authority on the subject of “Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility” is questioned if you do not blog, if you are not wholly transparent.
THE STRINGERS
People with local expertise in a given area, whether simply by living there, or having a vocation. These are the community of bloggers that everyone likes to talk about. It was suggested that local stringers could substitute for foreign correspondents. Rebecca McKinnon, with all due authority on the subject as a “ringer,” and having been a foreign correspondent, explained that the added value of FC’s is that they bring in the context for the home audience.
Also, the work of the Times’s Dexter Filkins in Iraq was explicitly saluted as stellar reporting.
THE WINGERS
I offered up the picture that a sizable portion of pundit-bloggers are simply “winging it"– on very little background information, context, reporting, etc. This is the most dangerous development in the blogosphere. No one has challenged this assertion yet.
Interesting concept, but it is naturally a very accreditation centered description, as one would expect from a group that is half journalists. I am certainly a winger; mediocre, uninformed, unaware of correct punctuation, no area of expertise, so I feel the need to answer Jon.
As I see it, the mediocre bloggers provide a valuable service -- authenticating the ideas provided my the experts. We get to do a gut check, as it were. Even with our a direct connection to the things being discussed by the stringers we can compare it to our meager experience. The collective statements of one thousand ordinary people saying their grocery prices are going up is at least as important as one well connected economist who can pull out an index. Probably more so, the index is a single statement, while the thousand have the raw data. Just because the economist has taken the time to draw conclusions from that data does not automatically give his view credibility. The vital assumption of the blogosphere, from the teenage girl's journal to a gardening group's blog to Andrew Sullivan's site, is that the collective thoughts of a great many people, each of which have a small piece of the puzzle, can be a greater aid than the formulas and presumptions of an elite.
Finally, the wingers allow the blogosphere to be much larger than would be possible if it were simply a community of experts. First, they absorb readers who would otherwise overwhelm the stringers and ringers and prevent the relatively close contact between writer and audience so important in the blogosphere. Second, wingers provide a bridge between the general public and the experts, putting the information in a context that is relevant to the public.
I really don't see what Garfunkel's problem is. If a blogger is irrelevant, a bad writer, or fails to research his subjects, he will not get the same kind of attention a more careful blogger will. Even if someone like this becomes successfull, it is not going to be the kind of attention Sullivan or Kos get. Besides, the audience such a person aquires will necessarily be limited, getting it's strength from partisanship, and so limited in the umber of people it can acquire.
It just looks to me like this is an incredibly elitist misunderstanding of the value of different parts of the blogosphere. Now, back to my mediocrity.
