"Slow Blogging" as a Movement

This story in the New York Times the other day:

Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail’s Pace

basically talks about leisurely, reflective and in-depth writing in blogs and calls it "Slow Blogging", or rather picks up that term from a few people who adhere to this approach, including some guy who wrote a "slow blogging" manifesto.

I guess it can be useful giving anything a handy label, and "slow blogging" might be useful to distinguish these types of blogs from the now-too-common "two lines and a link" (my jargon!) blog of the "Here's an interesting story about XYZ: [WITH A LINK]", which seems to be what many blogs are.

But, and I don't think anyone interviewed in the NYT article points this out, blogging used to be viewed, at least early on, and the ultimate self-publishing format, and was seen as an alternate to traditional media, though it was then shortly criticized for being mostly self-centered naval-gazing. But, the point is, most blogs used to consist of long postings, and many always have. The better ones in legal education, though they haven't replaced the law review process as some predicited, are auxillary brainstorming forums to the process.

Did I have a point? I guess since I seem to have fallen into a once-a-week average posting, after a pretty prolific October, I was somewhat happy to see my pace (or lack of pace) of posting to be justified as a "movement".

What the article didn't mention is whether there's been any study of the lengths of post in relation to their frequency on different blogs. When I get started, I can write up a storm so I would rank high in that comparison.

The NYT article points out that some blogging, mainly those are consist of short posts to keep friends and family updated, are being displaced by Twitter and such. Similarly, I think the the "two lines and a link" blogs, where people just note an interesting article or web page and try to push people there with just a cursory description (which describe a LOT of law library/librarian blogs) are also going to fall by the wayside - people won't "read" those blogs, but they might follow someone's del.icio.us or digg tagging/accounts/whatever they're called, if they're interested in similar subjects.

Funny, I wrote up the AALL meeting in Portland last summer, including a whole session on those sharing technologies - and I don't even have the jargon down. And there was that discussion on the ALL-SIS list about RSS that somewhat confirmed how little its actually being used by law students. All this points in one direction, and idea for an article I had a while back: all these technologies that get hyped when they're the newest thing are reall just "Solutions in Search of a Problem" (that would be the title of the article).

Full blog post...

A Texas Funeral and Legacy Technology

Got back Sunday from Texas where my wife’s extended family gathered to lay her late grandmother to rest. Helping to sort through her stuff, I found the old 35mm slides and 8mm home movies that she and her husband had made over the decades. The slide projector worked for a bit, but the cord was frayed and was going to short out, so we stopped messing with it. But the 8mm projector was in perfect condition, the bulb worked, and we had a great time watching old movies that none of them had seen in, probably, over twenty years.

The movies themselves dated from the early to mid sixties through the early seventies, and though they were just haphazardly stored, they were in good condition and worked fine in the projector. The old spring-driven 8mm camera was also in working condition and with film would have been able to take new movies (is 8mm movie film made any more?).

Fastforward to today. My wife is on her third iPod because the screens keep going bad on her and I’ve had at least that many VCR and DVD players die on me in the past fifteen years, and my DV camcorder has a bad tape drive. In forty years, if some of our descendants dig out a thumb-drive of digital pictures, or a laptop with a powerpoint on it, or a DVD with home videos burned onto them, will they be able to fire up such ancient technology in 2048 and enjoy such a comparable treasure trove of lost memories like we were able to do? Doubtful.

Oh, and at the cemetery, a few rows down from the burial service, I saw the model for the tombstone I want:

Well, perhaps except for the tennis racket and the “little redneck” part. I don't play tennis and I haven’t figured out how to put a gun rack on the back of my bicycle.

Full blog post...

Happy 233rd Birthday to the Marine Corps

This joke comes to mind today:

The place is Tun Tavern and the day is the first day that the Corps of Marines has been authorized. The first potential recruit walks in the door and after he signs up he gets his free tankard of beer.
The second recruit walks in and after he signs up he walks up to the bar and begins to talk to the first recruit. The first recruit looks the second recruit in the eye and say, "Son, let me tell you about the Old Corps."

Another version has the exchange taking place in a boat below the trapdoor in Tun Tavern (apparently, in this telling, located on the docks of the Philadelphia harbor) into which the “recruits” fall after being lured in with the promise of a free beer (in this variation the early marines were a bit less than volunteers). The first recruit is waiting when the second recruit falls into the boat and tells him “If you think this is bad, you should have seen the Old Corps”.

And I’ve always thought the final stanza of the last verse of the Marines’ Hymn was funny:

If the Army and the Navy ever look on heaven's scenes,
They will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines.

Yes, even in heaven, we get stuck with guard duty.
Full blog post...

Tuesday's Second Biggest News Story: Michael Chrichton Died

One of my favorite authors, Michael Chrichton, died Tuesday. The Andromeda Strain was perhaps the first books that I was compelled to read straight-through, staying up as late as I could in college and then waking up to open it and continue the next morning. Later I read his late-1980s/early-1990s novels like Rising Sun and Jurassic Park. Since then, whenever his name comes up in casual conversations, I mention the fact that he was a graduate of Harvard Medical School which, for the most part, my fellow conversants do not know.

Nor do they typically know, until I inevitably inform them with the boring details, that he was also an active advocate and practitioner of various “New-Age” philosophies. Few folks who have read his novels know about his collection of non-fiction essays, Travels. Its one of my favorite books (though, I have to admit, I will now have to dig it out from whatever bookshelf or box I have stuck it in) and in it he writes about both his time at Harvard and his explorations into different new age things like aura-viewing and exorcisms (his personal experiences with both are detailed in different chapters in the book).

What to me is most fascinating is that he examined these new age beliefs with an open mind but was staunchly conservative in the scientific views expressed in his books, even besides his explicitly anti-anthropormorphic climate change novel “State of Fear”, a notable passage from Jurassic Park notes that the hubris of some of mankind’s belief that we can actually make significant changes in Earth’s climate is completely unfounded was brilliantly recited by the late Charleton Heston in this YouTube clip:

The concluding chapter in Travels is a lecture for some learned scientific society that he was invited to present, but which for some recent he didn’t actually go through with. He notes several historic instances of scientists who were later found to have falsified their results, but also points out that the weight of anti-paranormal arguments that are based on the inability of advocates to produce their purported results in a laboratory setting are reduced by counter-arguments based on the inability of artists and musicians to demonstrate similar results of their purported abilities when plopped down in a laboratory, surrounded by white-coated scientists, and connected to electrodes and compelled to conjure up the “art” and “music” that they claim they can create under less strenuous circumstances. I’ll have to dig that out and re-read it soon.
Full blog post...

11/04/08: A Historic Night...

From Punditkitchen.Com, part of the LOLCat network of sites at ICanHasCheezburger.Com:




And now can we stop talking about how Republicans steal elections, the evil influence of money on political campaigns, and how America is a racist nation (unless you want to discuss the fact that a much higher percentage of African-Americans voted for Obama than Caucasian-Americans voted for McCain)?

Full blog post...