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January 27, 2005

The Genesis of BS

Still trying to get a hold on what a blog can be, and what this one should be, especially after reading Dooce's difficult time with comments this morning. It's not the place for my usual crisis rants (too personal), but I don't want to bog it down with a theme. I'll keep posting whatever interests me (or makes me mad) on a given day. At the moment it's a blog about blogs. My audience is pretty slim (Derek is already bored with it so, um, that leaves ... me). Overachieving perfectionist that I am, I'm doing my homework first. Here's how the blogging experiment came to be...

MT and Politics

First, a coworker raved about MovableType and showed me his blog (which is far more sophisticated in its simplicity than this will ever be). I thought: I need to do that. I should really do that. Maybe if I install MT, I too will write things like "On Photography is a wonderful book, at once a treatise on this enigmatic art form and a call to action," but it didn't happen.

Then there was MoveOn, which isn't a blog so much as a kick in the ass for people who want to get involved in politics but are lazy. That led to Wonkette and Daily Kos, which I checked now and then up to The Disaster in November.

The Yarn Phase

Disillusioned, I had an obsessive knitting phase, which naturally led me to an obsessive knitting blog phase. It started with Yarnivore, a blog written by a friend of a friend who recently opened a yarn store in Brooklyn. Then I found some serious knitting bloggers, and like many knitblog-addicts, ended up reading Yarn Harlot every day. I visited the blue blog and Mason-Dixon Knitting but always felt like an outsider because I'm not quite that serious about knitting 24/7 (a good thing).

Foodies

Boing Boing and some New York-related blogs are on my daily list now, but pictures of food and restaurant reviews are luring me into another subset of the blogging universe -- the food bloggers. There have always been the Chowhound people. But blogging has produced phenomena like Obsession with Food and The Amateur Gourmet. New York foodies now have a place to vent and an audience. Like the knitters, the food bloggers share photos about every stage of a project and organize group efforts. Is My Blog Burning? is a monthly event where a recipe theme (beans, terrine) and a date is established, and cooks all over the world blog about what they made on the chosen day. It's like Iron Chef done slowly, online.

There's a point here somewhere...

So the political blogging phase begat the knitblog plase which begat the foodblog phase. The problem is, I still feel lost because there are thousands of bloggers online and it's hard to summarize what they do.

Blogging is a medium in transition, and it is used differently by different groups. There are loose rules of etiquette and form to follow -- you have a title and tagline and a collection of links, you write in the first person, and your readers add a wide range of comments (unless you're me). A blog cannot escape being a reflection of the author's personality and priorities. How bloggers choose topics to write about, day after day, reveals what they value in their daily lives. For instance, my preoccupation with what other people think of me is abundantly clear... why else would I devote a whole essay to my relationships with blogs and my struggle to make this one decent? If I distance myself enough from my role as an author, maybe I can escape the vulnerability that bloggers inherently have.

Non Sequitor

It's restaurant week and places are so crowded that diners are psyched to get a seat on a crate in an igloo outside.

Posted by csageday at January 27, 2005 01:01 AM

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Posted by: Tony at January 29, 2005 11:43 AM

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