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May 25, 2004
Memo to the Blogosphere: Whatever
Ed's over on MetaEd asking for some help from his visitors so he can figure out which way to take things.
From a while back on Polytropos, I remembered a list of blog pledges proposed by someone of some note to someone else, mostly negative. I won't do this, I won't do that, etc.
Last year this time, I was working on talking pk into staying with Puddingtime!:
Weblogs become a sort of "know me by knowing my grazing habits" hyperlink mix tape... a collage of references that use the massive amounts of raw material provided by the Web to create a composite or mosaic of the person doing the compiling. Where lots of mix tapes are acts of brotherly love or desperate calls for bootie, many Web logs are substantially "cooler" in tone (witness memepool's fetishistic use of the oblique and laconic reference), but the intended result is the same: love my blog? Love me. Or at least recognize I have good taste in re-mediated content and spend mad time finding it, yo.
pk returned the favor today by sending me this quote:
Yesterday, after a brief phone conversation, a definition flashed through my head: Blogs should be whatever you were going to say before you thought of a reason not to say it. Away from the editor's demands, outside the parent company's parenting, and against any disincentives to frank critique, you throw up whatever's running through your veins and making you feel itchy or happy or mad or simply different than you did a moment before. If it becomes something else, is there any point?
So, in order:
Ed, see items 3 & 4 above. It's why I visit. If you start trying to create "content," something will be lost. I reserve the right to read what you've written, spend a solid 24 hours thinking of a rebuttal to something you liked for a single sentence or small thought, then show up in comments and bitch at you about it, but it's not personal. Or rather, it is personal but not in a mean way.
Please add:
I will abjure from making comment on how dumb the rest of the blogosphere is, even if it's in the form of self-conscious lists that pretend to be about me but are really about how dumb the rest of the blogosphere is.
Please don't implode in the process of adding this pledge. Or don't add it at all and get on with your bad self, because as much as I think those pledges are self-conscious, self-important twaddle, it's not really my business what you put on your page, and I need to go concentrate on not imploding myself, now.
Yep. I need to remind myself of that more and get on with my bad self, too.
Ed, go back up and read that again. It's true. I'm going to read it again, too.
Posted by mph at May 25, 2004 07:26 PM