I am trying to cut down blogging on blogging, but Tym sent me a neat link by W. Caleb McDaniel on "Blogging in the Early Republic: Why bloggers belong in the history of reading". I thought it was quite cool the way the author drew comparisons between the journal-keeping by antebellum American reformer Henry Clarke Wright in the 1800s and blogging today.
Excerpt:
Wright died in 1870, already a relatively forgotten reformer. Yet—and I speak from my own experience in 2005—his reflections on writing are eerily evocative of what it is like to blog. Wright shared several traits with the prototypical blogger—his eccentric range of interests, his resolution "to write down what I see and hear and feel daily," his use of journals to "let off" rants of "indignation," his utopian conviction that writing might change the world, and (not least) his practice of spending the "greater part of the day writing in his room." Was Wright a blogger? Are not his journals the fossilized originals of a species?
If you scoff at this suggestion, this is probably because you hold this truth to be self-evident: In the course of human events, blogging is the newest of newcomers.
Then we swing over to the very funny Alex Blagg, who tells us that "Your IM Conversations Aren't Interesting", and unless your name is bloodninja, you are no longer allowed to post your IM conversations.
Even the comments left on Blaggs's post is funny. Like this one and this one.
Die lah. What will we blog about?
Excerpt:
Like most things in life, everyone thinks what they and their friends have to say is unique and amusing. I assure you, it is not. If you manage to make some clever IM joke in the long, boring desert of banality that is your IM conversation, you really don't need to cut and paste the transcript and share it with the world. Seriously, we'll live without it. The truth is, they always sound pretty much the same:
