Tag Archives: Blogging

Boards on Quora: A new way to blog or manage projects?

Posted on December 19, 2011 | 2 Comments

One of my favorite websites, Quora, has launched a new feature called boards, which may put yet another nail in the blog’s coffin. Boards enable you to organize in one place Quora questions and answers, web links, notes and pictures on any subject you like.

It immediately occurred to me that boards were perfect places for project planning and management, kind of a virtual bulletin board where you can pin up whatever you like on a particular topic. That inspired me to start my first board: Learn to Draw and Paint. This is one of my goals for 2012, in an attempt to expand my creative outlets.

Boards would also make effective mini-blogs, on a subject as narrow or as wide as you wish. With tools like Quora’s Boards and Google+, it almost seems like we don’t need the blog anymore. However, the blog is still a great way to organize your stuff under your name on the web, all in one permanent place that can easily be searched, tagged and linked. Although I don’t update my blogs as much as I used to — and often, I am reposting content from another site to the blog — I still find the blog to be a handy way to keep a “home base” on the Internet.

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I have to rethink how I am using this blog. Lately, the number of posts, and my interest, have dropped off quite a bit. I still love WordPress, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also been giving me fits in … Continue reading →

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Posted on July 28, 2011

Analysis and thoughtful writing not endangered after all…

Posted on January 20, 2011 | 3 Comments

I like this take from Clive Thompson on how the blog, once a literal log of Websites, is now becoming a forum for longer, in-depth analysis once reserved for magazines and newspapers. His thesis is that Twitter and similar tools have replaced the quick link-sharing function once served by blogs, and that these social networks also provide a more appropriate place for instant reactions to news and stories — the “short take,” as he calls it. So more thoughtful analysis has moved to the blog. What really suffers, he posits, is the “middle take,” once provided by weekly newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek, but probably unnecessary in our wired world.

I see this at work in my own blogging and online sharing. I tend to confine links and thoughts “of the moment” — such as breaking news and reactions to it, or something that’s momentarily funny — to “short-take” forums like Twitter and StumbleUpon. I reserve more thoughtful pieces for sharing on my blog and preserving in Delicious.

But for truly long-form writing, such as essays, short stories and book-length writing, I return to paper. I still can’t stomach reading anything much longer than a typical blog post on the computer screen. Maybe if I had an iPad?

Read: Clive Thompson on How Tweets and Texts Nurture In-Depth Analysis | Magazine.

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Is there any point to blogging anymore?

Posted on October 4, 2010 | 1 Comment

I enjoy blogging so much that I maintain several of them, but I have to wonder if there is a point. To be honest, it often feels like I am shouting into the void only for the privilege of hearing my own voice.

Many web tools have arisen that do certain jobs better that I originally used a blog for since I started blogging. For instance, the purpose of the first blog I started was to keep notes and recipes while I taught myself to cook. Now I use Cookbooker to organize my cookbooks and to make notes on the recipes I have tried. Not only does Cookbooker maintain a searchable database of cookbooks and recipes, but it allows me to connect to other people who own the same cookbooks I do and see what they think of recipes I haven’t tried yet. I can’t do this with my blog.

I also originally started a book journaling blog to keep track of what I had been reading and post book reviews. Now I belong to LibraryThing, which maintains a searchable database of all the books in my library with my book reviews plus lots of other useful information. And it makes recommendations for other books I might like based on what I read. My blog can’t do that.

An original purpose of blogs was to share links, and I often do that on all my blogs, especially this one. But let’s be honest: There are more effective ways to share and organize links, such as Twitter, StumbleUpon and Delicious, all of which I use heavily.

So why do I keep up my blogs? I will admit I don’t post as frequently as I used to, but I try to post something on each blog at least once a week. The blog is still best for long-form writing, especially the kind of writing I’m doing now, when I’m just spewing random thoughts onto the blank page to help me sort them and reflect on them. And the blog really excels at functioning as a kind of electronic notebook, organizing everything in one place: links, random thoughts, longer essays, even media like photos and videos.

So I probably will keep posting to my blogs, even if it feels a little like masturbation from time to time. But I will keep on using those other tools, too, where I do feel like I more genuinely connect to other people, because — let’s face it — more people are on those sites than are visiting my humble little blogs. My blogs will probably continue to be my catch-alls from those other sites as well as a handy place to post my original thoughts that can’t really go anywhere else.

And that’s really what the blog is best at: a place for original thoughts. I need a place like that.

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Posted in Notebook

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So much crappy writing, so little time…

Posted on July 9, 2010 | 2 Comments

The web has made it easy for anyone anywhere to publish their writing with very little effort or money, and for the most part, I believe this is a VERY GOOD THING. There probably hasn’t been a time in history when people could so easily express themselves, and instead of shouting into the void, there’s a good chance that someone somewhere is actually listening.

But as freeing as this collective outpouring is, the writers of the web are producing a lot of dreck. Originality is as rare a commodity online as it is anywhere else. But I have found that the worst writing doesn’t come from the vast sea of personal blogs (although there is plenty of bad writing there), but from the so-called professional blogs that rely on a never-ending stream of content to get ads in front of eyeballs.

It’s depressing reading the same rehashed, boring, generic prose over and over again. These sites, which seem to constitute the bulk of what gets published online (at least on a regular basis) occupy the same wasteland as the magazines in the grocery store checkout line or the Today Show and its ilk — except they are much harder to avoid. Google’s search algorithm doesn’t filter for quality, as far as I can tell.

And I have to blame Google for this never-ending babble, because these sites believe they have to publish quickly and often. I know that pageviews drop if you don’t post frequently. And if pageviews are your bread and butter, then the act of posting — rather than the content you post — becomes the crucial thing. Who cares what you have to say so long as you keep talking?

So we get list after list of 20 this or 50 that, pseudo-slideshows designed to keep us mindlessly clicking, unsupported prognostications of the end of everything, vague punditry that answers questions none of us cared to even ask. Because of the pressure to keep posting, few take the time to ruminate, percolate, revise or edit. This isn’t writing; it’s masturbation by blog post.

I’ve found the best online writing either at the very top of the food chain — on the sites of renowned print magazines like The Atlantic or The New Yorker, some publishers that have invested writer and editorial talent in their websites, and blogs of well-known writers — and at the bottom, where individual writers toil in relative obscurity, simply for love. (I try to highlight those writers here when I unearth them.) The best links rarely show up in Google searches; they are shared by my virtual friends on Twitter, Google Reader, and the comments areas of my blogs and blogs I read.

But there’s a certain randomness to waiting for good writing to fall into your lap. There is no online library where high-quality writing on all kinds of subjects has been selected, cataloged and annotated. Who would be willing to pay for such a service when we are so used to getting everything on the web for free, even if it is one that we could all benefit from?

In the meantime, we keep floundering in the sea of dreck. The reward is when we discover a new insight or thought or poetic piece of writing. Sometime it happens several times in a day; sometimes it doesn’t happen for a week or more. But still, it happens.

You should also read:
The Future of Print (Booksquare)
Why I Blog by Andrew Sullivan (The Atlantic)
Slow Blogging Manifesto

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A new baby blog (not a blog about babies!)

Posted on June 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

It has been one of those weeks. You know the kind, where every day seems like Friday until that sickening moment when you realize it’s not. I had jury duty for the first time ever, which entailed sitting in a tiny basement room with lots of strangers who forgot their reading material and no coffee. Each day has taken on a surreal quality, due to lack of sleep and never-ending allergies. I am more than ready for the weekend by now.

Anyway, last weekend, I created a little blog on Posterous where I’m posting cool book covers and illustrations. I don’t know what I’ll do with it or even if I’ll update it too often. I was mostly using it to learn Posterous, which is a pretty spiffy blogging platform. I don’t think Posterous would work as well for power-blogging as WordPress does, but it would be great for a scrapbooking or research blog. The bookmarklet for posting from a web page works very well, and you can also easily submit posts by email. It’s a good tool to have in the online toolbox.

You can check out the new Posterous blog here.

Update: I realized when I reread the title of this post that it might seem I had started a blog about babies. No. I meant a teeny, tiny, immature blog.

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This feminist’s dilemma, and a side of rant about mommy blogging…

Posted on March 15, 2010 | 1 Comment
{{en|Portrait shows Florence Thompson with sev...

Have we come a long way, baby? Image via Wikipedia

The most interesting reading in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday was this little article titled “The Femivore’s Dilemma” in a direct homage to Michael Pollan‘s tome, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Posit: Once upon a time, women raised kids and took care of the home and were generally unsatisfied.

Posit: The feminist movement made it possible for women to go out and get jobs they can’t stand so they can work too much and never get to see their families, just like men. Now no one is taking care of the home, and everyone gets to feel equally unsatisfied.

Posit: In the modern-day “Mommy Wars,” you are either a Stay-at-Home mommy or a Working Mother. There is no middle ground. And you can absolutely not relate at all to someone who would make a different choice than you.

And that’s where we stand today.

I consider myself to be a feminist. When my son was born, I quit my job (and I have to admit that I wasn’t all broken up about that decision either) to take care of him full-time. Since I will probably only have one child, I considered this to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, one that both my son and I will benefit from. Meanwhile I have the rest of my life to work, sigh. But I did not feel like I had to turn in my feminist card at the door, and I completely reject the label of “stay-at-home” mom (or the more insipid SAHM).

According to the NYT Magazine piece, there are plenty of other highly educated moms who have followed the same route. I do recognize something of myself in the article. For example:

A generation and many lawsuits later, some women found meaning and power through paid employment. Others merely found a new source of alienation. What to do? The wages of housewifery had not changed — an increased risk of depression, a niggling purposelessness, economic dependence on your husband — only now, bearing them was considered a “choice”: if you felt stuck, it was your own fault.

It seems that today’s feminist feels a tad guilty about just staying home with the kids. So they become 21st century homesteaders, raising chickens and stuffing sausages and brewing their own beer and whatnot. They turn into “radical homemakers,” or to use the article’s cute term, “femivores.”

All of this extra, probably unnecessary hard work lends enough cachet to the non-employed-for-money mother that she no longer has to feel ashamed of stepping out of the rat race just to take care of the kids (which is hard enough, believe me). I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking on some of the lost domestic arts, if they provide enjoyment and a feeling of self-sufficiency. What I do take issue with is the notion of doing so to justify to other feminists the choice of dropping out of the standard career path.

Why can’t we embrace the middle ground, which is where I find that most of us live in the real world anyway? Some of us feminists don’t have any interest in breaking the glass ceiling. We get exhausted just thinking of power suits and power lunches. We’re not cut out for it. But neither are we entirely willing to tie a kerchief around our heads and go muck out the chicken coop either.

There should be room for all kinds of women and all kinds of ways to choose to live your life. And your choices don’t have to be a statement, whether for feminism or for so-called traditional values. They can just be your life. Enjoy.

P.S. Another article that caught my eye was in the style section. It was about “mommy bloggers” (another odious term), their conferences and brand-building and the general professionalization of motherhood now that we’re all on social networks. Here’s my question: Do we really have to commoditze everything? I understand that it’s nice to make a few extra bucks, but is it worth it to turn your every experience with your children into something that’s for sale? Or to chase after free swag to the detriment of your relationships? (True confession: I have one “mommy blogger” friend who I have stopped following on Twitter because I could no longer take her incessant PR-fueled tweets.) Well, if you ask me, the whole world of “mommy blogging” has become so infested by marketing shills, it’s hard to find anything authentic there anymore.

The Femivore’s Dilemma (New York Times)
Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy Building My Brand. (New York Times)
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So, I write two other blogs besides this one. I bet you didn’t know that because you never look at the stuff in the sidebar. Nobody ever looks at the stuff in the sidebar, even though I spend so much … Continue reading →

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Posted on July 1, 2009

Top 5 ways to find what makes you happy…

Posted on May 10, 2007 | Leave a comment

The blogosphere — the wisdom of our fellow travelers — offers a lot of good life advice. So much good life advice that it’s sometimes hard to process it all. Here are four great pieces of advice originating from blogs I read and one piece of advice from me that, taken together, provide a more-or-less complete instruction manual for how to find out what makes you happy — in work, in life, in all things.

Not that this advice is necessarily easy to follow. Much like meditation, you have to practice doing these things every day. Some days will be harder than others. You don’t just arrive at happiness, like the peak of a mountain after an arduous climb or the destination of a long train ride. Happiness has to be part of the trip itself. As with anything else, you get better with practice.

I’m submitting this article to ProBlogger’s Top 5 Group Writing Project, by the way. Cruise on over there to see a whole lot of variations on the “top 5″ theme.

  1. Recognize lies that you are told. This was inspired by a post on Pick the Brain, “Why are we afraid of the Truth?” While that post focused on scaring kids into not doing drugs, the fact that we all get lied to starting when we are children is unavoidable. The trick is to figure out what the lies are and question all so-called “truths” rigorously. Do you really need all that stuff or that gigantic house or that expensive Lexus to prove you’re successful? Does doing a good job really require you to sacrifice 60, 80 or more hours of your time a week, or to compromise your ethics? What other “truths” are standing in the way of your happiness?
  2. Tell your own story. The post, “Changing Our Story,” on growing changing learning creating started me thinking about how each of our lives is a story that we’re telling ourselves. Sometimes we get stuck living someone else’s story — our parents’ story of us, or our partner’s story – being who they think we should be. Sometimes we get caught in a story where we have no power, a victim story, a story where we are at the mercy of fate. Each of us needs to take control of our own story and make it a good one. By telling our story ourselves, we define who we are for ourselves.
  3. Practice conscious incompetence. This idea comes from a post by the same name at Slow Leadership. To find what makes us happy, we have to try a lot of new things and take a lot of risks. But no one ever starts out being perfect — or usually even good — at a new thing. Still, we all work so hard to avoid failure and making mistakes that it limits us. By consciously giving ourselves permission to be bad at something, we allow ourselves to stretch, improvise, learn something new without the residual fears of messing up or looking like an idiot. We free ourselves to find what makes us happy.
  4. Focus on the journey, not the result. This idea comes from the Bamboo Project Blog article, “Is Your Focus on the Shortcuts or the Journey?” While the article looks at this from the angle of nonprofit work, the question applies to everything we do. Life is the journey, after all. If you’re always focusing on the outcome you’re trying to achieve and looking for the shortest way to get there — the “get rich quick” scheme, the fastest way up the corporate ladder — you won’t enjoy the time you spend getting to that goal, which is really the point of it all. But if you do focus on enjoying your journey, then you’ll probably find that the results you want will come to you naturally and in the right time.
  5. Go with your flow. This idea is nothing new, but it is really the secret to happiness. We are most happy when we are in flow. Flow is that magical space when you become unaware of time passing, when you are completely in the moment and when you are producing something wonderful. For me, flow happens when I’m writing, when I’m cooking, when I’m in my garden, when I’m coming up with a project plan, when I’m designing a system, when I’m in a good meeting collaborating with smart people. Be conscious when flow is happening, remember what you are doing at those times, and try to re-create that experience as much as possible by making conscious decisions about what you’re going to do. The more flow you have in your life, the happier you’ll be.

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