jill/txt

See, this is why it’s important to carefully plan one’s blogging oeuvre:

There’s no need to be a celebrity blogger before you start. Gertrude Stein was sent rejection letter after rejection letter - up until the publication of her autobiography. So put your blog to good use!

Rules suggested for the aspiring self-promoting autobiographer include “Rule #2. A Good Advertisement Is Easy to Understand.” Lenart-Cheng notes, again in relation to Gertrude Stein, that “The fact that her autobiography has often been called ‘the one book by G. S. that an ordinary person can read’ is the best proof of the success of this compromise.” (page 123) One might consider following Stein in writing one’s autobiography in the third person, staging it as the autobiography of a devoted friend and admirer. This allows one to avoid violating the taboo of self-praise. Instead one can have one’s friend write things like “I met Gertrude Stein. . . . I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken.” If you want to do this in your blog by writing your own comments to your own blog posts, do be careful, it’s important not to lose your balance here.

Now, where blogs may truly rule in this genre is in their constant updating. You see, Rule #4 states that “A Good Advertisement Has to Be Repeated Over and Over.” Keep returning to the same points. Mention your name often - “Gertrude Stein” is repeated on average five times per page in her autobiography. The conventions of blogging make this easy: simply keep the “posted by Your Name” in the footer of every post and people will remember you.

I’ve already broken Rule #1, unfortunately, simply by citing this article. You see, A Good Advertisement Conceals its Strategy.

Unless, of course, I’m triple-bluffing you in a rage of stealthy cunning…

The recent Onion story “Mom Finds Out About Blog” echoes a line from an (apparently genuine) web diary I came across in 1999, where the writer actually considers having two diaries, “so I can have a slightly censured version for my mothers perusal. Kathleen said it would probably be a good thing if she discovered this page, it would give her a useful insight into my true personality. But, I doubt that anyone wants their mother to know THAT much about them.”

Unfortunately I didn’t write down the URL or the title, but I think that diary’s well and truly gone anyway. The article I cited it in is still alive (Jeg taster, derfor er jeg, I type therefore I am), but sadly it lost all its æ, ø and ås so is a pain to read. One day I’ll reinstate them. Plus, of course, it’s in Norwegian. But quite good - I’d forgotten that I was already thinking about this stuff way back before I began to blog myself.

Matt finally blogged François Lachance’s peripheral approach to blogging - François, as you’ll have noticed, has no blog of his own, but posts his thoughts in other bloggers’ comments, forging otherwise undiscussed connections between the bloggers in the cluster he visits, or probably in part creates. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, without writing about it, and I’m glad to see Matt’s thoughts:

The other day a commenter to Jane’s blog wrote a completely tangential comment, a wonderful short short story about her and a neighbour. Several comments later, after other commenters had ignored it, Denise writes: “johanna rocks. she needs her own writing space.” After that, Jane and Johanna herself briefly discuss the story. Perhaps peripheral blogging is the beginning of a trend? These are the productive examples. Comment spam is the bad side of blog-hijacking.

Francois certainly has a voice that is heard through his myriad comments across blogs.

I like this title: Weblogs: Personal Life Annotation Devices
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The 100 by 100 Project: one hundred posts, one hundred words each. (via Hanna)

“If the internet were a sentence, weblogs would be the conjunctions: the ‘ands’, the ‘buts’, the ‘ors’.”

Here are links for my talk today, which is titled “Blogger og nettdagbøker: hva, hvorfor og hvordan?”
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Oh dear, two of my favourite project blogs, lettersneversent.blogspot.com and thedateproject.blogspot.com, are gone, taken over by other bloggers. The Wayback Engine only has the front page and not the archives (thedateproject, lettersneversent. I have copies, mostly, but it makes me sad anyway; these sites were interesting and in places beautiful, and I liked linking to them and pointing people to them.

Update! The archives are still there! It’s just the front pages have been replaced, the old archives are safe for now. Here’s the starting point for The Date Project.

Previous talks I’ve given on blogs where I’ve blogged the links and talked from the blog post: HUMlab in Umeå, November 2002; IFI here in Bergen in February 2003 for about blogs and learing; with Torill in Oslo, April 2002. And I ended up basing my talk on youth literature and the web in Narvik this March on links I blogged here though I think I’d stored the webpages I wanted to show in Explorer’s scrapbook rather than use live links, I was uncertain of the net connection there.

Of course, putting the category at the bottom of each post leads to some funny sentences. I’ve not designed my categories for this grammar: “Posted by Jill to world at 8:59″ - well, yes, I suppose I am posting to the world. I could rename every category, organise all this by whom I’m addressing, or what emotions I’m expressing, rather than by what I think I’m talking about. “Posted by Jill to Apollo”, for instance, for clear-headed posts, or I could post to Diana when I was feeling chaste and forestbound. Thor for thundering fury. Buddha when seeking inner calm. Dionysos, obviously, after a night’s carousing. Aphrodite when in love.

What kind of posts would I address to you, though?

Navire.net has some beautiful writing, though I repeatedly stumble over the French: Could lapin be a new word for laptop, I wondered, at first, because what would a rabbit have to do with this? It turns out that the narrator calls her boyfriend her lapin, her rabbit*, and when he’s not with her, she writes blog posts to him:

Je suis dans un café à Marseille qui a un accès Internet. Mon lapin, j’en profite pour te dire que je t’aime, et qu’il n’y a rien qui n’ait plus de valeur au monde. J’embarque demain matin à l’aube. Sache qu’il n’y aura pas un quart à bord sans que je pense à toi. **

Isn’t that sweet? Tomorrow she’ll travel into the dawn***, to Montreal, perhaps, to her lapin. Or perhaps not, it seems a sea voyage is involved, from Marseille and around Spain arriving in La Rochelle. I might find the answer if I read more of the blog, but I like this uncertainty. The possibilities and openness of the stories in an newly found blog are only heightened by my creative interpretations of the French.

What happens, in a blog, when a post is directed to you in the singular rather than to the plural you of all possible readers? You, my lover, this is for you, and I dare to speak my love in public, in front of all my readers, knowing that it may be commented, linked to and archived. In French the private “tu” replaces “vous”, yet despite this public declaration of love, the use of “tu” keeps the identity of the lover private. A secret. The public secrets of blogs.
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I’m digging through old Usenet archives today, to see whether I can connect that early net publishing to blogs today, and honestly, we’ve been discussing the same stuff for twenty years. At 1985-02-22 08:57:16 PST a woman answered a question as to whether one can fall in love online thus:

I never fell for anybody I met over Usenet, but I have fallen for at least 3 people over Arpa. One did not work out, one we will see
about, and one is in negotiation.

Interesting that ARPANET gave better hunting than Usenet, don’t you think? And I wonder how the negotiation ended up. I’m thinking of comparing Usenet in the eighties to blogs today, tracing a line of inheritance, so the rest of this post will be links and ideas, mostly so I can keep track of this myself. I’ll add to this post as I go.
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The NY Times tells us about a protoblogger decides to run for governor and therefore starts blog - I particularly noticed the nature of her preblogging:

It’s mostly the lesser known candidates for governor in Southern California who have started blogs, but there are scores of them, says the artitcle. And there’s the governor’s wife. (Andrew sent me this link, thanks)

Biography’s special issue on Online Lives is available online through libraries that subscribe to Project Muse. The table of contents is free for all and you can order paper copies through libraries.

Tom Coates of Plasticbag.com has posted an article about weblogs as mass amateurisation. I’m not terribly interested in that, but love the nitty gritty of his comparison of the homepage to the weblog, midway in section four, near the end of the article. While the homepage is imagined as a place, he writes, the weblog articulates a voice. Even better: