Recently in Writing Category
For the next seven days, I'm going to be conducting a little experiment here.
I'm going to write an essay a day, and post it to this blog. Each posts should be at least 500 words long, and may be longer,
I have a number of topics in mind, but am open to suggestions of what people would like to read me writing about. Suggestions gratefully received in the comments.
Just time for a quick post before bed.
On my drive back from Suffolk this evening I was listening to the Westminster Hour and, in particular, the Sunday Supplement slot in which Gyles Brandreth discussed political diaries.
One of his interviewees made the point that keeping a diary changes the way you live. You start behaving in different ways, saying things you wouldn't otherwise say and generating opportunities to make your life more interesting, just so you can record it in your diary. It's an interesting idea, and it's one that can extend to blogging, I think. I've certainly gone places and done things just so I can photograph them, or blog about them. And I'm struggling to see this as a bad thing. In an age when many people just passively consume what's fed to them through the TV, anything which forces you to make your life more remarkable has to be a good thing, doesn't it?
Technorati Tags: blogging, writing, lifestyle, life, diaries
Right, out of self-pity mode. There are far worse things than mashing up your own foot, like having your whole city destroyed by a hurricane. Which is, of course, what happened to the people of New Orleans some months back.
As with all of these things, charity donations poured in initially, and then started to drop away. Well, I'd like to encourage you to donate by buying a book that I was involved with. Beyond The Storm: Shadows of the Big Easy is a collection of essays, fiction and role-playing material themed around the city, produced by volunteers with all profits going to the American Red Cross to support Katerina relief. I didn't actually write any of it, but I did edit chunks of it, including work by Mur Lafferty of Geek Fu Action Grip and Mikko Rautalahti of Fun Pastimes for Stupid Children.
The book is available in PDF or print format from the Beyond The Storm website. And it's all in a good cause.
There's a great post over on Storytellers Unplugged about the distinction between an author and a writer. This post is called I Do It For The Money:
Author: Person whose name is on a book cover.
Writer: Someone actively putting words down on the page.
I agree with pretty much everything she says here.
Technorati Tags: blogging
Tom Coates has posted an essay based on a speech he gave at a recent Six Apart event. It's entitled The Horseless Carriage...:
This is a slightly rewritten and polished up version of a talk I gave to a Six Apart event (cf. On being on the panel at Blogs in Action) at London's Polish Club a few weeks ago. It's kind of a personal history of and exposition around weblogs and webloggery. This version has had some of the more colourful language removed.
What it also is, beyond the above, is well worth a read. Go to it.
I suppose I should really say something about the death of Hunter S Thompson. Many of the reports of his death have described him as a writer but, to me, he was a journalist. His self-invented style of gonzo journalism which pushed the hack himself into the story even as it pushed any attempt at objectivity out, defined feature writing for the next few generations. Every time you read a journalist like, say, Deborah Ross who pushes herself into many of her pieces, you're seeing a little piece of the dead man's influence.
As many obituaries and opinion pieces have commented, his recent work hasn't really had the impact of his 70s writing, but any journalist whose work is primarily based on shock value is unlikely to be able to sustain that for long - look at Julie Burchill. But he still changed the way people write, and for that, we should be grateful.
Further Reading:
Up The Creek - Warren Ellis, who write the superb Transmetropolitan (a series that re-ignites my passion for my trade every time I read it) makes some valid points about Thompson's death.
Population: One: Hunter S. Thompson: RIP - Bryant calls for an end to pale imitators of Thompson's style, which I completely endorse.
One last post on the Metroblogging issue for now. This will be a little more serious than the posts to date.
Mr Bonner dropped by and left a comment below, and it got me thinking and researching. I'm fascinated by his sites, simply because they appear to taking advantage of the bloggers involved. Please feel free to correct any of this, if you feel I'm misrepresenting your operation, Sean.
1. The bloggers aren't being paid. There has been mention of the possibility of payment in the future.
2. The service is actively soliciting, and running, advertising.
3. The service is undergoing a rapid expansion to 20 or more blogs (as he mentions in the comment referenced above).
Now, I don't believe that Metroblogging is doing this purely in a spirit of altruism, to foster community involvement in the cities in question, and neither do others, it would appear.
So, Metroblogging looks like a commercial venture built off the back of a rather good blog. Bonner himself implies this saying: "Right now we're spending about $140 a month on each of the sites, we've made TOTAL $200 from ads. Do the math. We're losing money. But this is brand new, and I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't believe that would change." There's an inc behind it all, too,
It's possible that he's only aiming for the advertising to cover costs, but the possibility of paying authors further down the line seems to suggest that this isn't the case.
So the evidence points to Metroblogging using unpaid labour to build traffic to a site, which is converted into cash via advertising. Ergo, the bloggers are producing the product (the website content) for free and the company is aiming to make money from that.
This is a mug's game for the bloggers, in my eyes. Now, it could be argued that the Metroblogs are a good way of driving traffic to the blogger's personal blog. For me, that doesn't stack up but then I make my living writing, so writing for free for anyone but myself is anathema. Others might disagree.
Sean may well have the best of intentions with all of this. However, the combination of his attitude in his dealings with British bloggers (the result of overwork?), the lack of clear explanation of what he's aiming for (intentionally, it would appear) and the poor quality of the London blogs, among others, is not creating a good impression right now.
That could be the kiss of death for a venture like this. You need goodwill to build up a readership, and precious few publishing ventures can afford to ignore reader feedback. Part of the problem with the London blog is that Bonner has ploughed ahead with a British extension of the core concept, without making allowance for the rather more robust style of commentary and blogging we have over here, a legacy of our largely disrespectful print media.
There's nothing wrong with the idea of a commercial blog venture. There's nothing wrong with the core idea of Metroblogging or the London MetBlog. In fact, I like the idea. I'm all in favour of more paying outlets for writers... It's just that the execution and attitude are wrong right now. I'll carry on watching the site. I'll hope to see it get better. Right now, though, I'm not holding my breath.
Sean Bonner sums up his position on the London MetBlog issue.
Personally, I think the blog has only one real problem: some very weak writing mised in with some very good writing. That's an aesthetic judgement, though, not an objective one and therefor e only true for me and people who think like me.
However, on a professional level, I wouldn't let the poster called Cristopher anywhere near any publication or blog with my name on it as editor. Take this bland example of fact dump and uninteresting comment, for example. Oh, and look out for that nasty double negative!
