[blogs] Living in the Blog-osphere — Steven Levy on weblogs. ‘…most coverage of the so-called Blog-osphere (the name given to the collective alternate universe consisting of all active Weblogs) seems to focus on A-listers like pundit Andrew Sullivan, gadfly Mickey Kaus or former MTV veejay Adam Curry. Even the various computer-generated lists that purport to probe what’s happening on Planet Blog don’t go beyond the 10,000 or so most popular ones, rated by the numbers of links to and from the various sites. But the bigger story is what’s happening on the 490,000-plus Weblogs that few people see: they make up the vast dark matter of the Blog-osphere, and portend a future where blogs behave like such previous breakthroughs as desktop publishing, presentation software and instant messaging, and become a nonremarkable part of our lives.’ [via Scripting News]

[blogs] You’ve got Blog — another ancient article (2000, from the New Yorker) about blogging … ‘Because the main audience for blogs is other bloggers blogging etiquette requires that, if someone blogs your blog, you blog his blog back. Reading blogs can feel a lot like listening in on a conversation among a group of friends who all know each other really well. Blogging, it turns out, is the CB radio of the Dave Eggers generation.’ [via plasticbag.org again]

[blogs] Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man — old (2000) profile of Jorn Barger … ‘…Barger felt something was missing — a context for his postings, some frame of reference that would fill in the contours of his Net persona, now badly fragmented across the boundaries of his various newsgroups. His Web log, in the end, was born to fill that need. It was conceived less as the quality news digest it has become (frequented by thousands of the Net’s most knowledgeable) than as a portrait of Jorn Barger, rendered in the medium of his own daily, unexpurgated curiosities. ‘ [kinda via plasticbag.org]

[blogs] Tom reconstructs We’ve Got Blog … ‘If you were interested in reading – but uninterested in paying for – the collection of articles printed in the book We’ve got blog (which includes an introduction by the esteemed Rebecca Blood), you may be surprised to realise that almost all of the pieces within it are freely available on the interweb. And don’t worry – most of them are just as interesting online as they are squirted onto paper.’ [Related: We’ve Got Blog]

[blogs] How we’re spending our time at Pyra — what’s happening with Blogger … ‘Sometime later this month, the first public, large-scale, non-Pyra-run installation of Blogger will go live.’

[comics] Blogtree.com — Blog Genealogy. Great idea… LMG can be found here on Blogtree and I’m a father already! … ‘You can register your blogs and record which blogs inspired their creation. You can also search for existing blogs and view which blogs they in turn inspired.’

[blogs] Swish Cottage rates Great British Blogs … Fine summary of Plep: ‘A staggering array of random links. The Bifurcated Rivets that’s fun to read.’ [via Sashinka]

[blogs] One last quote about Great British Blogs, from Life as it Happens: ‘What does Anita Roddick know about blogging? And Alan Rusbridger? Granted, something of this response is the idea of the Outside World peering into the blog golfish bowl (“But you don’t understand!” “You’re not one of us!” “You don’t get it!”) Assuming they are reading as everyday readers, why should they not? On the other hand, those who do not blog on a regular basis may well miss the fine points of the game.’

[blogs] Couple more quotes about the Great British Blogs Competition…

• Blogjam: ‘…the Internet has turned me slowly from an outgoing, gregarious, popular fellow into a shallow, reclusive computer dweeb with very few remaining friends, and blogjam is the nearest thing to a serious relationship I’ve had in some time. In summary, I think blogjam warrents some recognition for putting up with me. It’s the very least she deserves.’ [via Wherever You Are]
• Blogadoon: ‘I suspect Blogadoon is too strong on cock and spite, too weak on tech and eye-candy to rate well in any kind of mainstream beauty contest.’

[blogs] As always the conversation around the Guardian’s Great British Blog Competition makes it much more interesting…


Meta-Blogging: plasticbag.org #1, #2, Blogjam, Inkiboo, Metafilter, Grayblog, not.so.soft, iamcal.com, Wherever You Are, Venusberg, Blogadoon Troubled Diva #1, #2, #3 … plasticbag.org: ‘if you look at the opinions that matter to people, it’s mostly not celebrities or media figures. In many ways, for a large number of people, they’re almost the enemy! They’re relics from the past where for the most part we are kind of the future – the future where everybody is a superhero! Where we all get a slice of the cake, a bite of the cherry. And more importantly, there’s a real feeling that these people most often don’t understand what we’re doing anyway! We’ve seen people like this for years – it’s all PR blurb and airbrushed skin. I don’t think that’s what the weblogging publishing revolution is about! Make them start their own weblogs!’

[blogs] Gerard and Dan find each other. From this …

‘I’m saying, you simpleton, that to claim that the RSPCA is wasting its time complaining about the welfare of animals while people are dying all over the world, when your own life is so utterly and comically meaningless, is hypocrisy. Or, more precisely, stupidity.’

To this (in about 17 moves) …

‘Mr Dan, where do you live? If it’s London, I’d love to meet up for a (non-alcoholic) drink. You seem like an interesting fellow.’

[blogs] Barbeblogs — The Barbelith Underground gets it’s own communuity blog site…. ‘We are neither a cult nor a religion. We are a large group of lightly cracked pots, entertaining ourselves by exchanging bundles of electrons.’ [via plasticbag.org]

[blogs] My Blog, My Outboard Brain — Cory ‘Boing Boing‘ Doctorow on blogging. ‘…operating Boing Boing has not only given me a central repository of all of the fruits of my labors in the information fields, but it also has increased the volume and quality of the yield. I know more, find more, and understand better than I ever have, all because of Boing Boing.’ [via Kookymojo]

[blogs] London Bloggers Tube Map — stalk your favourite bloggers via Cal’s tube map … [Related: NYC Bloggers]

[blogs] Don’t Read This — transcript of an Instant Message conversation from Chris at Do You Feel Loved? … ‘If Osama Bin Laden was gonna drop a nuke into the earth’s core and said “The only way to stop me is… to suck off this monkey!” I’d just be like “Dude, that’s it? Whatever” and go to town.’

[plasticbag] Tom is doing a survey about Weblogging…

[underground] Tube Map — Cal’s been busy again… ‘I know about 374 connections between 272 stations.’

[tech] A couple of interesting articles from Steven Levy [thanks Kabir] …

Great Minds, Great Ideas — Levy on Stephen Wolfram and Dean Kamen … ‘“A New Kind of Science” is encyclopedic, a “Ulysses”-like text that applies Wolfram’s ideas to a wide range of subjects: physics, math, philosophy, robotics, economics, logic, even theology. One reason it took him so long is that he kept unearthing new discoveries in various fields. It became a joke among his assistants. “So you’re going to figure out some big thing in this field in the next couple of days?” they’d ask. And Wolfram would say, “Yes, that’s what I’m going to do.” And proceed to do it, at least on his terms.Some scientists aren’t exactly thrilled. “There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories,” says physicist Freeman Dyson. “Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.”’

Will the Blogs Kill Old Media? — Levy on Blogs. ‘…once you’ve created your blog and filled it with links to news accounts of the Pim Fortuyn assassination, snarky criticisms of Bill O’Reilly and witty rants about airport security, how do you get visitors? Judging from the top blogs, the answer seems to be working hard, filling a niche, winning a reputation for accuracy, developing sources and writing felicitously. This sounds a lot like the formula to succeed as a journalist inside the Big Media leviathan. With the difference that traditional journalists uh, get paid. What makes blogs attractive — their immediacy, their personality and, these days, their hipness — just about ensures that Old Media, instead of being toppled by them, will successfully co-opt them. You might argue that it’s happened already.’

[blogs] Pat Kane.com — the Scottish journalist and musician has a weblog … ‘pop, politics, technoculture…& scotland’

[comics] Peter David is blogging (kinda) and REVEALING SEASON SIX BUFFY SPOILERS (beware) … ‘Greetings and solicitations. This will be the first of what will ideally be daily updates in this on-line journal. In the near future, we’ll have a regular Q&A set-up, plus we’re trying to figure out how to produce an on-line whack-a-mole.’ [via Neilalien]

[blogs] The Life Cycle of your Weblog — Sadly, no section on ‘Endlessly Linking and Quoting Meaningless Drivel’. Oh well… must try harder. [via More Like This]

[blogs] Douglas Rushkoff has a blog …‘I’ve always resisted the polarity of a dialectic – those heated, two-sided debates. The process itself seems to entrench us further in specific reality tunnels. Academics and committed politicos hate me for it, but I really am committed, for the timebeing, to avoid getting too stuck in a singular, absolute way of seeing the world. Polar argumentation and the duality it promotes make this harder to do. And this is why fundamentalists enjoy things like the Middle East crisis so much. It throws even formerly “moderate” people back into the more extreme corners of their reality tunnels.’

[comics] Neilalien — comicblog concentrating on Marvel, the mainstream and Doc Strange … ‘Neilalien of course does not aspire to rise above the noise and crap. Not until he gets interviews with Brian Michael Bendis, anyway. He tries to keep things honest though! For example, he always discloses that he doesn’t own Marvel stock before criticizing President Jemas! ‘

[blogs] Weblog Bookwatch — it searches recently updated weblogs for links to books on Amazon and compiles a list… ‘For recreational use only — please, no wagering.’ [via Scripting News]

[blogs] Graybo’s infamous Passport Gallery … ‘and it was only ever meant to be a bit of innocent fun. that’ll teach me.’ — Graybo

[blogs] They Have Blogs! … ‘He’s a punk goggle-eyed performance artist who has the hots for Angelina Jolie. She’s an overweight ambidexterous graphic design artist who writes about her amazing, talented and deeply-loved spouse more often than she writes about herself. They have blogs.’ [via kookymojo]

[blogs] Feeling Listless Logo Archive — I really like these logos… my favorite … ‘the best option was to combine the name of the site with it’s subject matter, my life and how I feel about the latest cultural events. And so I struck upon the idea of cultural artifacts which mean something to me (to a greater or lesser extent) also expressing the name of the site. The picture at the top would be as much a part of the weblog and the writing. This is an ongoing record of these logos …’ [Related: Feeling Listless]

[web] Christopher Walken’s LiveJournal … ‘have you ever wanted to punch someone square in the teeth, just to see how many fall out? i met ben affleck today.’ — March 24th Entry. [via Grammarporn]

[blog quote] Inkiboo: ‘Really think I shouldn’t call this site a ‘blog’ anymore. Two reasons for this. First being that there seems to be a high percentage of male bloggers who are gay. This is all well and good, but it could reduce my chances of getting laid. Second, a lot of bloggers are just self obsessed assholes.’ [more]

[blogs] Are You A Hit-Obsessed Weblogger? … ’35 points is in the 20 through 39 precent TYPE C (HIT-CURIOUS). You do the weblog thing for yourself instead of for an audience, but you are aware that you do have an audience, small as it might be. You are often curious as to what other people find so interesting about your weblog. You check your weblog referrers every now and then just to satisfy your curiosity.’ [via Feeling Listless]

[blogs] MemeMachineGo! — What a great name for a blog! :)

[blogs] nickdenton.org: ‘People like Doc Searls and Meg Hourihan are to the weblog as Oppenheimer and von Neumann were to the A-bomb. Gentle souls whose creation will be used by others more ruthless.’

[logo envy] Feeling Listless has moved — which gives me an excuse to rip-off another one of those excellent logos …



…and mention that he’s pretty popular with Middlesbrough football team… check out Stuart’s guest book: ‘Like your site. You must put a tremendous amount of effort into it. I spend most afternoons checking it out, after my morning’s training. I shall get more of my teammates to follow suit. The links are impressive. I only wish I had a laptop so I could access it from more places.’

[lmg] LinkMachineGo is two today. Got any favourite quotes from LMG? Let me know. Below is a quick review of the last year in quotes (and one picture) …

March 2001 … ‘Uncle June and I, we had our problems, with the business. But I never should’ve razzed him about eating pussy; this whole war could’ve been averted. Cunnilingus and psychiatry brought us to this.’ — Tony Soprano.

April 2001 … ‘Pamela came round with an egg-decorating kit. William’s eggs were a riot of primary colours; Glenn’s depicted Jesus on the cross. He wrote a bubble out of Jesus’s mouth, “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”, which disturbed Pamela: “For God’s sake, Glenn lighten up. It’s Easter!” Later, while William played with the packing of his Barbie egg and Glenn watched The Greatest Story Ever Told, she led me to my room and gave an erotic Easter egg, the centre of which contained a pair of edible knickers. She was keen for me to break it open and retrieve them. I was less keen: a glance at the ingredients told me they were choc-a-bloc with obscure chemicals and multisyllable flavourings.’ — Adrian Mole.

May 2001 … ‘Have you ever wanted to shove a glass rod right up Nick Jordan’s cock?’ — Venusberg.

June 2001 … ‘…do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters.’ — Dave Eggers.

July 2001 … ‘Oh no! You’re not still seeing her, are you? You’ve been wanting to get out of this relationship for years, and now the mother speaks of marriage? You must do something drastic my friend. Make a pass at her father! Go on…. just give his knee a little squeeze…’ — Tango Advert.

August 2001 …



September 2001 … ‘I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.’ — Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

October 2001 … ‘Okay. I have a vestigial tail. It’s more of a nub, really. The spine just goes on a little longer than it should. Also, I’ve dabbled. I mean, perform fellatio once and you’re a poet, twice and you’re a homosexual. I remember once I was being fisted by Sebastian Cabot- but here’s where the story gets interesting…’ — Dr Evil.

November 2001 … ‘Sat in a sandwich bar in Westminster I meet the sharp south-London wideboy occultist that I’d created some years previously for a U.S. comic book. He looks at me. He nods, and smiles, and walks away. Years later, in another place, he steps out from the dark and speaks to me. He whispers: I’ll tell you the ultimate secret of Magic. Any cunt can do it.’ — Alan Moore.

December 2001 … ‘If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality. The hijackers used fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanising hatred to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy. Among their crimes was a failure of the imagination.’ — Ian McEwan.

January 2002 … ‘What kind of man are you anyways? I’m talking comics and you bring up chicks and romance.’ — Brodie.

February 2002 … ‘What the fuck is Voltron talking about? Is this some religious thing? Am I fucking being baptized by Voltron?’ — Get Your Voltr On.

[blogs] Steven den Beste on blogging and Amway … ‘It occurred to me today that web logging is a form of multi-level marketing, for some people. The currency is hits, the organizational structure is linking. The structure is a cross-branched tree; with people getting a percentage of the traffic of sites which link to them. The object of the game is to get other people to make permanent links to you. The more important the site which does this, the more valuable the link and the higher you rise in the pyramid. When your site begins to get a lot of traffic, you in turn can bestow largesse on those below you with transient or permanent links, and by so doing begin to build your own downline when they link back to you. The grand prize is to get “A-listers” to link to you; then you get a percentage of the huge traffic their sites get.’

[blogs] Weblogs as community — book extract from Derek Powazek’s Design for Community book … ‘I don’t believe that there is one cohesive weblog community. Instead, there are many communities, groups, cliques, and clubs in the weblog space. Any weblog with comments can quickly turn into a community of one, attracting a small group of people who are interested enough to follow along and participate. And if each of those readers then starts a weblog of their own, with comments that the others take part in, you wind up with a giant, interconnected, ever-evolving community. Or, better, a hazy cloud of overlapping communities, each with its own feel, and sharing a few members.’ [via Evhead]

[past] Let’s Blog like it’s 1983…

• Film: Risky Business … ‘Joel, you wanna know something? Every now and then say, “What the fuck.” “What the fuck” gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future.’ [Related: Risky Business at IMDB]
• Comic: Swamp Thing 21 — The Anatomy Lesson … ‘You see, throughout his miserable existance, the only thing that could have kept him sane was the hope that he might one day regain his humanity… the knowledge that under all that slime he was still Alec Holland. But if he’s read my notes he’ll know that just isn’t true. He isn’t Alec Holland. He never will be Alec Holland. He never was Alec Holland. He’s just a ghost. A ghost dressed in weeds.’
• Book: Christine by Stephen King … ‘If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.’
• Game: Manic Miner by Matthew Smith … ‘Can YOU take the challenge and guide Willy through the underground caverns to the surface and riches. In order to move to the next chamber, you must collect all the flashing keys in the room while avoiding nasties like POISONOUS PANSIES and SPIDERS and SLIME and worst of all MANIC MINING ROBOTS. When you have all the keys, you can enter the portal which will now be flashing. The games ends when you have been ‘got’ or fallen heavily three times.’
• News: Headlines on Ceefax for the evening of Monday 3rd October 1983 also Guardian Coverage from 1983 … Mrs Thatcher in 1983: ‘ She has a temperamental determination and some shrewd populist instincts and she has acquired that inner metal which comes from having visited the edge of disaster. But she owes as much to luck as to native skill and her success has been achieved in spite of her propensities to rash misjudgment, wilfulness, and narrowness of mind and vision. She is not short of fatal faults to bring her down.’

[blogs] not.so.soft: ‘There is so little that’s original on the web these days. Everything seems a bit recycled, plagiarised, stolen, revisited, reworked, repackaged. Especially in the personal publishing world.’ [via Venusberg]

[blogs] A bit of UK Blog history — thinking about a UK Blog Timeline …

• Dan’s Website / Daily Doozer … January 1999.
• Bifurcated Rivets … April 1999
• Blogger Launches … Late August 1999.
• Barbelith / plasticbag.org … November 1999.
• The Nutlog … January 2000.

Any others? Tell Me.

[blogs] Need To Know: ‘The BLOGGIES are announced, and all of the constantly updating, filter and linking, daily diarists of the Web are there to cheer the winners on. Excepting the www.livejournal.com folk, and those everything/nothing kids, and the advogato/kuroshin journalers, of course. Nope, this one’s for people who do *proper* weblogs.’

[blogs] Psychology of Weblogs by Dr. John Grohol … ‘Most weblogs are drivel, banal shit written by angst-ridden teenagers and adults sharing feelings, thoughts, and mind-numbing details about their daily lives that provide little insight into anything or anyone.’ [Related: Follow Me Here on Grohol]

[uk blogs] One last link about UK Blogs … Watch a nation of 419 blogs update with the Recently Updated List.

[uk blogs] The GBloggies have a website … ‘What’s it all about!? UK Bloggers like to complain! So we’re giving them an opportunity. As Five should have said, “Let’s Bitch!” NOW WHAT?’

[uk blogs] Meanwhile in UKBloggerland… (in the style of Graybo and Cal) …

• Dan is wondering about Human Cocks.
• Dave is pondering the future.
• Matt is filing things for the future.
• Meg is burning CD’s for her sister.
• Mo has got water in his bathroom.
• Tom thinks he isn’t Arch, Illicit or Warped.

While we are on the subject of UK Blogs… the GBloggies. ‘Most likely to fantasize about Thatcher’ [via Graybo]

[blogs] Anti Bloggies 2002 … ‘Like the Bloggies, but bribes are accepted – nay, encouraged.’

[blogs] Credo Of The Web Log Writer — the rise and fall of a weblogger… ‘I will write poetry and buy a webcam. I will only link to other ‘A-List’ Web Log Writers and ignore wannabe’s who link to me. Other Web Log Writers will do what I do, only worse. I will ignore or quit my real job since my loyal readership will support me via PayPal and my Amazon Wish List.’ [via 2002 Bloggies]

[blogs] Pumpkin Publog returns … ‘A rolling review of pubs in and around the London area, punctuated by thoughts, musings and crap about pub-life.’

[blogs] Premium Blogger … as reported on Ukbloggers by Neil McIntosh… ‘Evan plans to start building up a premium service: in the next few hours, he’ll launch a $30-a-year membership scheme, which will offer faster and more reliable service. The free Blogger will remain, but other – quite compelling – premium services will be rolled out quick-fire after that.’

[via kookymojo]