Blogs are Farmers on Diving Boards

Imagine a farmer on a diving board - that's my idea of a blog. A guy with the leverage he needs to leap way up into the air and fling seed everywhere - and in a fun, goofy, belly-flop kinda way. Blogs are the perl of our linguistic genres - a marvelously useful way to 'make difficult conversations easy and impossible conversations possible'. They are, like the CMS that power them, middleware in the repetoire of human interactional genres: The create informal networks and conversations, but are more structured not informal conversation. You can blog a conference, but all the Navy Seal shit (intellectually speaking of course)goes down at the bar, where alcohol (martinis, preferably) and camraderie galvanize your brains and get the intellectual juices flowing. Blogs allow the initial presentation of thoughts and ideas long and structured enough to put in a book, but they are not books, nor is their formal structure of the sort in which one develops into a book without a lot of work. Blogs stand in between, like the custard before it sets: too thick to truly be appropriate to the ebb and flow of conversation, too thin to take on the hard solidity of a book. Because basically folks, to continue the metaphor, I see a book as a big piece of brisket: too tough for you to cook up at one go, but potentially finishable if you keep it in the over long enough. Especially if you marinade it. My mom always used tomato sauce. I'm not sure what that means. What is the tomato sauce of blogs?
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  thanks to wood s lot

INSIDE BLOGGING

BJORN: We see weblogs as important makers of meaning. They take advantage of our educated, opinionated, connected world. The N.Y. Times is not necessarily the gold standard anymore.

RICHARD: We're collaborating on this because Bjorn is the first person I met who knew what a blog was.

BJORN: And Richard is the first person I met who was curious about them. And soon, if we 'deliver' on our promise on those green sheets announcing this lecture, we'll have each of you to talk with us about (pause, roll of drums)

BOTH: The Blogosphere.
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  thanks to wood s lot

Some new blogs in the blogroll...

Body and Soul, BoingBoing, dervala.net, MOBYlives, Riley Dog, The Memory Hole, and The Rittenhouse Review.