The Guestbar!
A tiny, guest-edited blog!
Alan Graham
Alan Graham is an author for O'Reilly & Associates, APress, and Wordware. He is also the creator & editor of the Best of Blogs series.
In putting together the blog book, I realized that outside of photo blogs, there were several specific types of blog entries.
Informative: short, sweet, linked. Makes a quick point and backs it up with a link to another site. Boing Boing has made this into an art form.
Blisdom (blog wisdom): can be short or long, relies on a narrative to make a subtle point. Often pulled from a life experience. Here's an example from a conversation with my wife:
Wife: I just had the strangest dream. I was on a train...
Me: Coach or First Class?
Wife: Honey, I don't dream in coach.
Vanity Post: Often inane. Represents everything that journalists like to point to and say, "See, blogs are worthless."
‘While the unexamined life may not be worth living the overexamined life is not worth reading.’
--Scott Simon of NPR on “inane weblogs”
That doesn't mean these blog entries aren't interesting when read as part of the whole blog...it just means that if there is a point, it is often missed by the casual visitor, like going from Sopranos series 1 to series 4.
Fiction: There is a lot of emerging fiction popping up from blogs. Harder to find, but worth the journey.
Then comes the post that has had the biggest affect on my life. I don't have a clever name for it, so let's just call it the "shoes" post...as in walk a mile in another's shoes. Sometimes it has a clear point, and other times it just resonates inside you. Whatever the author's point behind the post, it takes on new meaning in your own mind. Sometimes you learn something about someone else, but often you learn something about yourself.
Here's a few examples of these types of posts:
My Waking Nightmare by Adam Hindman." Be sure to explore the rest of the site. Some brilliant short fiction here as well.
So, Are You Japanese, or Korean? by Alice Matsumoto. A good example of how the desire to identify with another culture often makes you look like an idiot. Like my uncontrollable need to play hip-hop around my African American friends, so I am seen as cool...even though it is quite pathetic and probably transparent (now I play Def Leppard...ultra white, but has the word "def" in it).
Then we have Stand. A Korean-American man who, at separate points, has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and manic depression. He has been institutionalized 5 times through the two main "episodes" of madness, the first having lasted from July 1991 through about April 1997.
A sample:
"There is nothing to be done about this, I think. It stays hidden from view, as it only comes when no one else is around. It is not distressing, really -- the phenomenon has been with me so long I have put it down as old hat, par for the course. Looking at me, you would never know that I routinely talk to angels in my spare time."
and
"You cannot say, I don't think, that in this moment, I was sane, and in the next moment, I was insane. Many borders in this life are fuzzy, hazy. You cannot say one thing ends here and another begins. Or maybe there are parts to it: on this day, just my foot was insane, but not the rest of me. Something like that. Or maybe it was that "snap", after all. Maybe it's when you're so far gone you can't talk your way out of it. Maybe only when they're sure you're gone, you're gone. Before that, you're just weird or eccentric or even "interesting". No one wants to believe it, least of all you. You joke about it all the time, but man, when it's serious — keep away from that. So, when was it, exactly? I dunno. I think it was when nobody was laughing anymore."
This site makes me wonder if perhaps Neil Gaiman's brilliance is rooted in madness.
posted by Alan Graham at 8:19:26 AM | permalink
I wrote a blog entry about Kinja over at O'Reilly. I think what they are doing is important, but I have some concerns on how it will work over time.
Which leads me to a few interesting facts about my new book Never Threaten To Eat Your Co-Workers: Best of Blogs.
-When we initially started collecting the entries, we were using an online forum (not my idea). What's funny is that it had a profanity filter on it. So I think this may be the world's first book edited for profanity in reverse. We had to go back to insert cursing.
-We knew that we'd have to make some cuts due to page count restrictions. So, I assembled a team of three advisors to read and rate the content on a scale of 1-5, five being the highest. Only one entry of the approx. 170 received a perfect rating of five. Will I ever reveal which one? The bidding starts at...
I'd also like to see a study done about this...
Here are some entries from some of my favorite women of the web.
