Weblogs

January 17, 2010

Sherry, I've been a terrible blogger here, despite having Thoughts that I want to tell you and everyone. I want to write posts on asking girls out, and books, and resolutions, and then on other things. But since I'm being all meta about blogging, I'll add on a couple other things. Then I'll write those other posts and queue them up.

Thoughts on blogging:Man, I love my loosely pseudonymous water policy blog. It is such a selfish blog to write. I say exactly what I think about some arcane issue, and I don't explain the context or give background. I expect informed readers to keep up, and don't help them if they don't. I don't expect an audience, either, because there aren't that many people who are interested at that level. But it feels great to write that blog. I love it, writing that fast and selfishly.

It is also pretty fun being pseudonymous. I'm not pseudonymous enough, because of all you people who can go from "Megan" to that blog. But water people who never read blogs don't seem to go the other direction (perhaps they have and are politely not telling me). But I see people whom I know read that blog at the cafe, and get a silly little thrill that they see me but don't connect me to that work. It is a little unfair, but it is also fun.

***I readthis piece, on a former journalist who was hired as a blogger and immediately started flaming people. I'm speculating based on nearly nothing, but I wonder if he didn't think that flaming people is required of the form. Like, that's what bloggers DO, and not only is he freed to do those things, but he'll be acting in accordance with the form if he starts in with name-calling. I wonder if that's a clue to how journalists think of us. Man. He is going to get real tired in the not-very-far future if he tries to keep that up. That hyped up energy level is draining, to write, to read, to follow. I don't think the bloggers who trade in that form can keep it up.

More and more I think that blogging only lasts if it satisfies something in the blogger's personality. Exhibitionism, pedantry, a yearn for connection through text, something. But it has to nourish the blogger; spats drain the blogger, not nourish. I've also been thinking about how long-term bloggers become chill. There are still comments or flames that could get under my skin, but the most of them are just noise. Being provoked by mere snark or something obviously originating in pure ideology? I'm not in the original round of bloggers, but with a couple years under my belt, those don't even touch me any more. Spend attention on those? I'd rather try to stop the tide. At least then I'd be digging around in sand or pouring concrete.

Well, good luck, journalists-forced-into-blogging. If you're working from a big platform, you started with an enormous boost, which may or may not do you any favors. I hope you find the best in blogging, because the best of it is great. But in blogging like anything, you'll get what you put out. If you don't like or respect the form (because it isn't what you wanted to do when you became a journalist, or because your early exposure was critiques of your work that you never had to put up with before), you'll get irritated, disrespectful readers back. You're in charge of that, but you're going to have like blogging, from the inside, to get a commentariat that likes your blog.

***Speaking of the best of blogging, reader Scott sent me jam recently. That's so amazing. The magic of the internet turned thoughts and pixels into something tangible and yummy. I am very grateful that people like you guys read here. Y'all impress me so much.

February 11, 2009

My friend just called me. He was just talking with someone who runs a professional society. She wants to create a blog for their field and thinks he'd be perfect for it. He's never blogged, but he likes the concept. He agreed. He's going to write the blog for their field! She has all the contacts! It'll be great!

Me: Awesome. How much is she paying you?
Friend: It isn't about that. It is about the chance to influence the field.
Me: Really? How much time are you thinking of spending on this?
Friend: We know it’ll take some time. Five or ten hours a week.
Me: (laughing) Dude. You just signed on for a minimum twenty-five hour a week unpaid job. If you are doing this to reach people, want to change the dialog in your field? That's a full time job or more.

Friend: But she already has all the email lists and it will get unveiled at a big upcoming conference! It has a boost.
Me: Yep. But then they have to come back.

I've seen this a few times, where people who do not blog or read blogs think they should create blogs for some purpose. Couple years back, a respected thinktank advertised for a blogger. Every other person in their office has a Ph.D., but for the blogger they thought an undergraduate degree in Communications was enough. In addition to creating and filling the blog, the blogger was also supposed to handle IT at the office. I know they hired someone, but two years later that blog's not up yet. My friend and the person backing him have never blogged, and my guess is that they don't even read blogs. But they figure they know the topic and know people. They figure the blogging part won't be that hard.

Honestly. Blogging is a skill. We are several years into it, and it is settling out like every other endeavor. The people who do it well and last are the ones who put in work. If you see it done well somewhere, there is a lot of thought and attention behind that. In fact, you should probably estimate that it takes as much work to blog well as it does to do anything well. If you do not think you could draw well, or take professional photographs, or design dresses well without learning how and putting lots of time into it, then you should not think you can blog well without putting time in. The very good subject matter blogs are done by professionals now. There are some natural bloggers, but there are also no barriers to entry. If you're a natural, I suspect you're already blogging.

I'm not quite sure why people who aren't a part of blogland respect it so little that they think it can be done casually. It must not look like work to them. “What? You put up a couple links to some stuff and you write something short and catchy sometimes. Every now and then you write a long essay. You coin catchphrases. I think brilliant thoughts all day long. You just write them down. How much work can it be?” The answer, if you want to run a serious blog that is a major participant in the conversation is, a lot. You are crafting a body of work in public. It is real work.

But here's the most important part. Non-bloggers and non-blogreaders never get this. The only thing that can keep you going is if you feel the call. If you are not driven to write by something within, you can't write a good blog1. If you are driven to write, but not pulled to the blog format, you probably won't write a good blog either. You won't write an influential blog, that's for sure. Readers can tell and they have instantaneous easy exit at every second. The form requires too much small constant effort to fake. I see it all the time, journalists think they know about daily deadlines and writing, so they'll just cross over. People with big names want a new way to influence thought. Even if they're used to writing, they drop out. You specifically want to blog or you can't do it for long.

So, no. I don't think just anyone can blog. I think only people who want to blog can blog2. If you do want to, you can, no matter where you're starting from. In some ways, you should. Blogging for a while will strengthen your voice and clear your thought and help your writing. In other ways, even if you do it well, you won't get that much from it in the end. You’ll have a portfolio of pieces that don’t translate well to other things, a record of a time of your life, a better sense of yourself, and relationships with good people out in the world. You might change some minds or help someone3, but you aren't guaranteed to find out if you do. It might help you professionally, maybe. Really, though? For all the effort it takes, the results are pretty intangible. Doing it, the writing itself, is most of the reward you will ever experience.

I will try to tell my friend this, that he's got to want the writing part and enjoy the work part, since that’s the only part of blogging that is a sure thing. I'll help him with the software and set-up; I'll give him as much advice as he wants. But I'm also going to tell him that he better want it the same way he’d want to play a sport or take up a hobby. If he doesn't, all the connections and support in the world aren't going to make his blog interesting. Readers aren't going to be more interested in his blog than he is. That's not how it works.

December 23, 2008

I was terribly ostracized in sixth grade, completely isolated. I took the whole thing fairly stoically. I read a lot and stopped trying to make eye contact or exchange words with anyone. Some kids were mean. Most just ignored me. Several months after we graduated, one of the moms, I think it was Ms. Kahane, saw me at the park. Her son had been popular. She recognized me and said hi, and somehow got around to asking me if I missed sixth grade and everyone I'd gone to elementary school with for years. If I remember right, I told her “No. It was horrible and everyone was mean to me. I don’t miss anything about it.”* (I didn't tell her that her son had been a full participant in my shunning.) So yeah. I do understand not wanting to go back. Back wasn’t all good.

See, now, this story and your post make me want to go in two different directions.

Let's try the first direction:

The stuff you say, where you worry about people's perception of you. I don’t get that. This stuff:

“a sense that who I really was inside was uncool and unambitious and unworthy according to the rules of the [law school] world”

“My ambivalence about this question is now officially Odd.”

I really don’t understand that worry. I think it was burned out of me in sixth grade. I do not give a fuck what people think of me. I don't care on the downside and I don't care on the upside. I don't care. It wouldn't occur to me to wonder what people in my class in law school thought of my goals. They aren't me, so I don't care. If they went as far as telling me that my goals are wrong, I would care enough to tell them to suck me. But I would never actually entertain doubt based on that. Other people having opinions about my preferences for having children?** Shockingly irrelevant. The names of distant stars are more important to me. I don't care. They aren't me and their lives aren’t changed by my choices in having children. It is unlikely that I'd notice, but if it got through to me, I'd forget it by the time I wondered whether we have enough arugula in the garden for a salad tonight. I just don't care.

This shows up other ways. I don't care what clothing I wear because I don't care what impression I make because I don't care what strangers think. I have finally honed my wardrobe into entirely bland, but that's out of an intellectual decision, not because I care in my heart. I also don't notice praise. It never sinks in. I'm stunned when I realize that people have been paying attention to me and pay heed in meetings, because I didn't care enough to notice that was building. It made me a resilient blogger, because I laughed when people hated me and I ignored when people fawned on me. I don’t care about either. (I hated when my message got twisted. I care a lot about information transfer. But I don't care about strangers' opinion of me. (This fades some at the extreme ends and I do care what friends think of me. But it holds for most of the middle ground of blogging.)) I think this blind spot, held deep and strong, came from giving up in sixth grade. I knew everyone's opinion of me and it sucked. It wasn't going to get better, so my only option was to stop caring.

From this perspective, your awareness of other people's opinions seems like a big burden. You spend bandwidth and energy on it? It adds a constraint to your decisionmaking? That looks tiring. Is there a way to take that load off you? My opinion of you and whatever you choose is that it is brilliant and perfect. If you must consider an outside opinion, couldn't you just use that one? I wish you could just not care, but the only way I know to achieve that is a year of ostracism, That trade-off isn't worth it.

Now, back to the fork in the road and the other direction:

Strangely, for all that I don't want to re-connect with my past or join Facebook, I really do track the persons from my life as closely as public internet allows. I google old classmates every few months. I keep track if I can. I like getting news about marriages and babies. I have to say, I also like that Facebook and Twitter are taking some of that function away from blogging. I think people want very much to say how they're feeling in the moment and I think they want to relay their news. But that was never my favorite part of blogs. I've always liked blogs that add synthesis and tell truths that take more work to express. I like the blog access to arcane expertise.

We talked about what we wanted this blog to be, and one of the things we discussed was valuing the blog form of media. It is too easy for me to dismiss the essays I put up, the ones that show a small piece of what I know about how we move water. Whatever. It is just a blog post, without good citations or an institution backing it. But the aggregate of those posts is a body of work. It happens to be a format I'm good at, and I haven't taken to another as readily. So maybe instead of thinking that I'm not good at reporting or writing academic articles or whatever it is that blogs aren't quite as good as, I should instead value what a blog is and does.

One of those things is the longer stories and insights that you write so beautifully. I'm happy if we keep writing those here, on whatever schedule suits our urge to write. I think we're both over our first blogs and that greedy need for numbers. We can wait between posts until something moves you or me to tell a longer story, lingering in the details. I'm writing at the policy blog now, but I remember how I liked to go back and forth between policy and personal on my old blog. The pendulum will always swing and I will always want to write the other again. Perhaps from time to time, Tweeting will feel inadequate for the thoughts coalescing in your mind and you'll look around for a pink and red blog to write on. Perhaps I'll just want a place that I imagine is warmer and cozier and just friends talking about the worlds they love.

But really, this is up to us. Even more really, I'm not trying to win the blogs any more. There is no external prize, so we should do this in exactly the manner that makes it a gift. If it is a burden, we should stop.

October 31, 2008

I am going to get in real trouble here, because we haven't talked about this ourselves, in the back channel, and we believe in blogger solidarity.

But isn't it time to think about comments again? We love the email we get from people. Our readers are smart and funny and nice, and interesting.

We lied when we said we'd regularly take people's comments and make them into posts and responses. We don't do that, hardly ever.

So our readers don't get to see the thoughts other readers plant in our heads, or how they work their way through our ideas (or fail to resonate with us). Our readers don't know there are other readers out there.

I know you miss the feedback and challenge that you got from readers. And I think you don't miss all the angry oddballs who personally attacked you. I miss the sense of people reacting. I love the emails we get, but I assume (and wonder) about people who might be reading but not bothering to email. I wonder if our readers would enjoy one another.

I am much more likely to answer emails than I am to chime in with comments. If we open up comments, I'll read every one and almost never write anything back. I understand the model of comments as a conversation, and the role of blogger as facilitator, but I don't want to get into that, and I don't have the time for it. (Plus it's not fair to people who use feed readers.) Bloggers talk here in the posts, readers talk in the comments. I know you've always done it a different way, answering and participating and moderating comments to cultivate a vibrant and challenging conversation. Phew! I don't want that kind of responsibility, and maybe comments are no good if bloggers aren't vigilant about the rules and the tone.

Whaddya think? Is something missing without comments? Or is this better as a back-and-forth between two voices, with a friendly backchannel available by email? Readers, please email us your thoughts. Megan, scold me in public or in private. In public, probably. Well, wherever you want. I am ready.

September 12, 2008

Here are instructions on how to sew your own TV-B-Gone device into a hoodie, so you can stealthily turn the television off in a restaurant you're visiting, without attracting attention by waving a remote around. I've just subscribed to the Instructables blog, with all kinds of do-it-yourself instructions for things. I'm not crafty, but I love creativity, and I get a real kick out of these posts. I thought you might like them, too.

My buddy Rich went to NASCAR driving camp, and what he wrote about that day is one of the freshest pieces of writing I've read in a while. It's not some big metaphor, it's just a great and exciting piece of writing. He writes like he talks, and he tells a great story, and reading this reminds me how lucky I am that he chose me to sit next to in our first year of law school.

I don't know Woman of the Law, but I read her and root for her, and this post about weight and money and the lingering anxiety of childhood poverty is also excellent.

Help a shrink out with a hard question. I can't decide if I would choose b) or c), myself. I want the doc to be right. And I also want the medicine to work. How about you?

August 22, 2008

Seems someone else is interested in friendship and the web. Imagine that. I stole a peek at the syllabus and may read along. It seems that the distinction/blurry line between friend and fan that can sometimes arise in this particular medium of blogging is not addressed specifically in the syllabus -- nor, really, is the concept of friendship in the first place. That's where we can help, perhaps. Maybe we should make a YouTube video about going from fans to friends, and submit it for consideration.

I'm still stuck on what you talked about, friends and fans. I think there's more to be hashed out, and I'll probably be noodling it around in my head for a while. You can be a fan in real life (when I have a crush, it feels like being a fan), but it's less likely. Fandom arises when the information flow is unequal, when one person is paying a lot more attention to the other person than is reciprocated. Like it or not, people who read our words know us in a way that we don't know them, until they write and begin a conversation and we meet and fall in love with them and all that.

August 02, 2008

This is a polyphemous moth, which you probably already knew. I see them once every few years, about as often as I see a praying mantis, so I think it's pretty cool to get a glimpse. They're big and green and special looking. I don't know where they live most of the time. The few times I've seen them it's been a misty morning, and they've been frozen still on the outside wall of a house or here on a fencepost under the eaves, waiting for their wings to dry off.

I'm fond of the polyphemous moth not only because they are beautiful and strange, but also because I associate them with the first realization that I could write. I was in college and had procrastinated an essay about art, of all things, until late at night the day before it was due. I had procrastinated because I had no idea what to say about art. I had dutifully gone to the art museum and looked at a bunch of paintings, and had read some art critic's meta-notes about ways of seeing, which I didn't really understand. And it was 11 PM and I hadn't started the essay and my roommates had rejected my attempts to come up with something, anything, we could do instead of writing this paper. So I poured a thermos of coffee and took my heavy old 1992 laptop and a blanket up to the roof of my dorm and, in a panic, I just blurted. I wrote about my uncle's farm in Vermont, and the starry skies there and how cold and clear and distant the stars looked when you tipped your head up in the country darkness. And how we woke in the morning to find a mist in the field and dozens of moths frozen on the farmhouse, big and exotic and fragile and beautiful. I wrote about how confusing it is to live in a world where sometimes the sky feels so thin and the stars so close that you feel like you could spin up and off the edge, with nothing to hold you on to the surface. And also where somehow there is mist and gentle protection for these eerie huge still mothwings. There was a painting I had seen that somehow captured both of those things, a protective atmosphere, with unseen moths lurking in the thick still air, and yet the clear dark pull of the cold universe, full of stars and blackness and nothing else. I drank my coffee and wrote without editing until I didn't have anything left to say, and then I went to sleep and woke up just in time to turn it in.

July 31, 2008

Sherry, darling, I don’t want to compare, and I’m not saying it is wrong or anything, and I would never tell you how to blog. But I kindof noticed that your title below is a little obscure. What would you throw in the water fountain? Is it some song lyric that we’re supposed to know, about water fountains? This blog is open for everyone, but not everyone is a mind reader, you know. You may not be aware of this, but people think in very different ways and if you use obscure in-joke titles, you may be leaving some people out. Maybe if they were wearing their gadgets, there would be a record of their confusion and hurt feelings. Anyway, I know you would never want that, so I’ll just let you think about how you want to title your posts in the future.

July 23, 2008

When we sat in my kitchen and talked about doing this blogging thing, we talked a lot about audience, and how having one can be both good and bad. Good is obvious, right: attention and feedback and that little thrill of connection. But bad is something we both experienced. You got frustrated with your commenters, felt boxed in with dread that you'd be nitpicked to death. And I got to feel this pressure when I sat down to write, to be the happy self or the authentic self or the inspiring self, whatever it was I came to believe people expected me to be. (It was sort of silly, when I think about it now.) So, this time, no commenters, at least to start. And, we said, we'll do this together to keep each other honest. If I know I'm writing to you, I'll tell the truth. If I'm writing to the great wide world, I am tempted to edit, omit, redact. But I can tell you all of it without fear or shame. And maybe some interesting things will happen if we do that in public, letting other people sit in on our friendship. Maybe we'll make some more friends.

That was the other thing I remember talking about, when we were talking about why do this at all, why not just communicate on a backchannel like we've been doing. I think you brought it up, but I liked it a lot. It's good for people to see healthy female friendships. There aren't so many models for that, and maybe ours being out there in public will be helpful to someone.

Rhubarb Pie

Email and Comment Policy

We're reasonably good at answering emails, although no promises -- we get distracted. If you make us think about something in a new way, we might use some of your email in a new blog post, unless you tell us not to. It's really nice to know you're out there, and what you think.