I’m trying to make this thing as much like a virtual sketchbook/scrapbook/notebook as I can, and avoid the regular trappings of blogging, like long link rolls and book reviews. (Even though I like those trappings on other blogs.) However, if you want that stuff, check out the del.icio.us and LibraryThing feeds on the sidebar.
Search Results for: blogging
ESPRESSO + LIBRARYTHING
Trying my best to copy Don, I bought an espresso machine and started playing around with LibraryThing. It’s my day off, so I’m going to spend it on caffeine, reading like a madman, and blogging like crazy to make up for the severe lack of posts lately. Stay tuned.
As for the reading: In addition to being a National Book Award nominee, Gene Yang did his master’s thesis on comics and education. Dover Thrift has some really cheap, really amazing art books. Joann Sfar is one of the best men in comics, period. McCarthy’s new book is dark, depressing, and beautiful — like his last one, I think it’s basically a pulp novel, begging to be made into a movie. Saul Steinberg is January’s greatest (re)discovery. Arnheim’s book is on Tufte’s reading list, so I’m down.
GOING DARK
Blogging, it turns out, is the CB radio of the Dave Eggers generation.
– from “You’ve Got Blog,” an article on blogging that ran six years ago in the New Yorker
* * *
It’s crunch time. I’ve got a synopsis that needs to come together within the next week, which means I’ve had to renew my relationship with Microsoft Word, which, let me tell you, does not make me happy. Summarizing with words a story told in pictures is NOT my idea of a good time…
But anyways, you probably won’t hear from me next week.
Be good.
MAKE IT EASY FOR THEM TO ENGAGE WITH YOU
Clive Thompson wrote a great article for CBC about how the Myspace/Google/bloggo culture is changing journalism. Here’s the meat:
…newspapers and broadcasts and magazines that open themselves up – that make it easy for the audience to pass them around and share them – will thrive. Those that close themselves off to the audience’s cut-and-paste culture will slowly die. Want proof? Compare the Christian Science Monitor and The Wall Street Journal. The Monitor has a hard copy circulation of barely 71,000, a pale shadow of the Journal’s mammoth two million readers. But online, the Monitor dominates: It is proportionately 377 times more frequently linked-to than the Journal. That means it enjoys proportionately far higher traffic, far higher online influence, and far more attention from search engines like Google.
How did the Monitor accrue this advantage? By being promiscuous. The Monitor leaves all its stories permanently online for free, while the Journal locks its behind a pay-to-see wall. Bloggers thus almost never link to Journal articles, while they love to link to Monitor articles. Because it makes itself so amenable to blogging culture, the Monitor taps into pass-around culture and these rolling cascades of popularity. (Granted, the Journal is undoubtedly assuming that what it loses in online audience it gains, financially, by having a more exclusive readership. But that’s no way to influence the world, when the world now lives online. And given the steady migration of advertising online, it may not even be the soundest financial ploy.)
So this is how journalists in the future will capture the protean attention-span of society: They’ll make it easy for the online world to engage with them.
I think the key here is generosity with your audience: the more online content you offer to your readers, the more brand loyalty you will build, the more product you will end up selling. It seems counter-intuitive, but really, sometimes giving things away for free can do worlds of good for your endeavors.
Online presence is everything, whether you’re peddling papers, comics, or burritos.
DRAWING CRUMBY COMICS AND LISTENING TO KID A
- “Actually, a lot of these poses in these panels I took from freeze-framing the Fly Girls on In Living Color.” – R. Crumb
- Meghan says KID A is the ultimate work-in-the-studio-with-headphones album. If, like me, you’ve been out of touch with your Radiohead fandom, check out their blog. Lots of cool pictures recording the new album. Also, check out Stanley Donwood’s slowly downward. His photoshop work and site design for Radiohead…big inspiration for me when I was 17.
- Ray Kurzweil on Science Friday: the singularity is near.
- Short story: Eric Puchner reading “Animals Here Below.”
- Short story: Etgar Keret, “Actually, I’ve had some phenomenal hard-ons lately.”
- Sean on “Tonight You Belong to Me,” from The Jerk.
- Virtual drum machines. Awesome.
- Great interview with Dan Savage from a while back.
- Oh, Project Runway. It was probably the safe bet to give Chloe the money, but damn, I really liked Santino. (Andre and Tim at Red Lobster, Tim Gunn singing Closer, the musical numbers…)
