Birth of a weblog
It's been a fortnight now since I put this weblog up, I am at the ides of the Userland trial period. It seems a good moment to pause and consider.
It seems fine; like being able to choose your own oar from the rack before getting in the boat and starting to row. There are features - the news aggregator and assorted site lists - that keep you effortlessly in touch with the webat large. Mostly it does what it means to, which is to let you just think about the writing. I was over at a Radio site called
theShiftedLibrarian and came away with a strong sense at just what came be accomplished with one of these things. Plus, her short tutorial on how to hammer at the XML code that the navigator links macro scoops up allowed me to start to arrange that the way I wanted. Thanks Jenny! Oh and note thats Shifted Librarian, not Shifty Librarian.
The particular joy of having something like this (the word weblog itself still grates having too much the ground meal of enthusiast and newspaper lifestlye coverage in it for my taste) is in taking the river of passing thoughts and notions that flow through one constantly and daily, and stopping one every so often and casting the unfortunate fish down on paper. Examining it and being forced to consider whether your thought had any merit or wisdom after all. The turning point for me to getting Radio userland set up was the first day of the Trent Lott brush fire as it burned through Metafilter. It was the evening the Washington Post article appeared, which I had skimmed but hadn't got as far as Lott's infamous comments which were related on an interior page [this is how the Post typically handles things like this], but someone at Metafilter had noticed and started a discussion on it. The noteworthiness of Lotts statement was immediately apparent. A gaping breach in the wall of political quiesence. A backbencher, maybe, could get away with a statement like that, but no one in a leadership role of either party could, and survive with their career intact. And yet Metafilter was rife with chatter that it was no big deal, even a perfectly respectable set of opinions. When a few people spoke up to say that it wasn't, that it was simply racist, a flat out call for the days of Jim Crow. The resisting chatter grew strident. A movement sprang up in a series of posts to "respect Matt's wishes" and not discuss articles from major newspapers with front page posts. Within in a short while these voices succeded in pushing the discussion into Metatalk, Metafilter's interior dialogue page, effectively ending the public disscussion, which is what these people wanted. Call it reverse Godwin by proxy. I started to write a post to protest this, but by the time I got back to it the following week the story had broke nationally and from there on no amount of pulling white sheets over it would hide it. By then; though, I had made my mind up to start my own weblog.
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