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Happy birthday to me! Hey, do you know what this blog is about? I use it to report on the OPML editor and people in the emerging blogs.opml.org community. Think of it as the OPMLville Herald. Links below are mostly to other OPML bloggers, with a brief interruption for conference reporting from BlogHer. Kellie Miller has a fabulous cheat-sheet on OPML macros. Rockin'. Kosso: Well Blow Me Down...If a New Entry button hasn't just appeared in my Blogging window! RESULT! ;) Thank you Mister Winer. Aldo Castaneda: "Does this mean the death of my other blog?" I have these issues too. There's no way I could give up on the five years worth of content on my blog...but blogging this way is very compelling. I'd love to have this as an optional interface to my existing blog. Tom Morris's OPML Test Blog:"Want to know why I'm a libertarian and not a conservative? Simple. The war on drugs." Jim Armstrong on the OPML Editor: "Faster: It's About The Need For Speed." Agreed, indeed! Al Delgado: Good Morning from Salto de Agua, Chiapas Mexico." Jim Kennedy: "My plan for this blog is to communicate my thoughts regarding a certain urban renewal project taking place in a certain small municipality in Florida. More to come." It's also a happy birthday to Lisa Canter and Ms. Spanglemonkey, attendees at BlogHer yesterday. Today is the feast day of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Fear and Blogging in San Jose. Wow! There's now a Mac version of the OPML Editor! How did he do that so fast? Thanks, Dave! Feejworld: "This is a test post of the emergency blogcasting system." Staci Kramer has an OPML linkblog. Excellent. I was unable to get on the network at BlogHer yesterday after noon, so I've got a ton of backlogged posts that I'm going to post here as soon as I figure out how. Okay, I did it -- here are my backlogged posts from yesterday's BlogHer conference. In the How To Blog Naked session; panelists -- Koan Bremner, Ronni Bennett, and Heather Armstrong. It's packed. No network access. Thank Murphy I have the OPML editor which works offline. Katie Burke: "Just in the last few months I've started writing an identity blog. I don't write anonymously, and I'm out there..." Dooce: "There are certain responsiblilities you have to people in your live...Specifically, if you want to maintain a good relationship with your mother, don't write an essay about the Mormon Church calling them as bad as the terrorists." Ronni: "The personal benefits to me are enormous, in terms of knowing myself. Whenever I'm writing, whether it's me or Crabby Old Lady -- Crabby Old Lady gets to complain a lot, and she's a lot funnier than me...I'm 64, and, I've learned more in the last year about me than I did in the previous 62 years." Everybody's using this term "identity blogger," meaning, I guess, people who write about their own lives in their own voice, and have the intention of exposing their true selves on the blog. It seems to be a more assertive and personal term for what's often called "a personal blog," often in the phrase "just a personal blog." Identity blogs leave out the "just." Koan: "The thing I got out of being an identity blogger was that I can say (Shows her t-shirt, which says "Proud Trans Person") Which I was never able to do before. I always used to say I wasn't ashamed of being a trans person, but now I can say I'm proud of it. I didn't expect that to happen, and that is a huge benefit." I love unexpected outcomes. We can't know what we're going to get, and that's the best part -- the unknown is what's alive. Dooce: "Five years there was no way that a magazine would hire a single mother to write about being constipated." "I can only see this getting better, and better, and better, and bigger, and bigger, and it's thrilling." Jen, Mommy Needs Coffee: "When I first opened up about being a recovering addict, I got a lot of comments saying, "Oh, you should have your children taken away." Dooce: "I felt so good throughout my pregnancy that I didn't think anything would happen to me...my mother was the most maternal person I'd ever known, and I wasn't feeling that naturally...It got to a point where my husband started to have a hard time living with me...and I felt like I was lying to the people who mattered to me, and lying to my audience...and there was a group of people who said, "I'm going to have your children taken away, I'm going to see to it." But that's one percent, and the other 99% said, "We're going to be here when you get back, and it's okay to feel this way." Postpartum depression -- I wouldn't recommend it to anybody -- but it was one of the best experiences of my life." Ronni: "The thing about somebody dying is that every day something happens that nobody knows what to tell you to do about it....When we admit something difficult on our blogs, we give other people permission to do that, and when you get it out in the sunshine, you're always going to feel better about it." Koan: "I expected to get heavily flamed or stalked or beaten up...and it hasn't happened. And that kind of worries me in a way, because maybe I'm not doing it right!" The mean people will always find you whether you have a blog or not. Having a blog lets the well adjusted, happy, good people find you. Participant: "That's my biggest fear -- having my child taken away from me. Do you people remember I, Asshole? She was divorced, and her husband used her blog to try to get custody of her child. It was unsuccessful, but it scared me a lot." Yikes! Mena Trott: We acquired LiveJournal, and that was one of the reasons why -- because we saw how important it was to be able to restrict who could see your post...Before we had the company, I had my own blog, and it was really fun, until I started to get a lot of readers. I'm really sad that I can't write anymore, because it was really fun to do...because whatever I write about is read into as being about the company...For instance, I went on vacation for the first time in four years last week, but I didn't write about it, because I'd have to hear, "Oh, there she goes, spending that MT3 money," which I never stop hearing about." Dooce: Actually, I've never been stalked by a man before, but I've been stalked by many women -- not in a sexual way, but in an "I hate you, and I'm going to destroy you." way." Koan: "I've already outed myself in every way that could possibly hurt me...and I did that deliberately, so that no one could ever hurt me." Yeah. I didn't really think it through when I changed my blog to being explicitly under my own name...but in a way, I've sort of idiotproofed my future life. I can't hang out with people or work at a company that doesn't like to have people who are identifiably human in a way that's Google-able. That's not so bad: I have to say, if I got a really great offer but I knew I had to be less openly "me" I might make the mistake of taking it. Now I can't, all my stuff is already out there. Liz Ditz: "All the trolls and the flamers have been out there doing it all along. The only thing that's different with blogging is that you can hear it. And that's how I calm myself about it -- I say to myself, "It's nothing new." Now onto the Suffragette Journalists: An Op-Ed Page of Our Own session: Hey, it's Chris Nolan! Interesting: she started her blog because some civic organizations in San Francisco asked her to write about the Mayor's race (and helped fund the site). "When Gavin Newsom started issuing same-sex marriage licenses, he became a national political figure...Having covered Congress, I knew what a national political figure was." Newsom was the opening for Politics from Left to Right to become a national, rather than local, politics site. Holy crap! It's Susan Kitchensover in the corner doing the recording for the eventual broadcast of BlogHer sessions for IT Conversations. Nolan: "The newsgathering proces has left the building -- it's no longer in the newsroom." Kramer: "Whenever I hear the term citizen journalism it makes me feel like I'm not one...a citizen, I mean." Gahran: "The Zapruder film -- it was news, but was it journalism?" I met Amy at Susan's house the night before the conference. She's awesome ;-) Nolan: "It was labeled fluff. Well, Quattrone is under indictment because of my work -- I don't think he thinks it's fluff." Melinda Gipson, National Newspaper Association "If we don't diversify, we're gonna die...If newspapers can't represent the community that they're in...then we're completely irrelevant." Melinda held an informal roundtable today during the break. The tent card read: "What's wrong with major media (if you want to fix it)" Participant: "There's a movement afoot to "train" citizen journalists at local newspapers. And they get a certificate, and a secret decoder ring. And then their posts get elevated. Where's Mike Wallace's secret decoder ring?" I got mine ;-> Courtney Lowery, New West Network: "Why is it more effective for me to call up a couple experts and say, Hey, can you tell me what's going on here, quote them, take them out of context, and it comes out saying what I think...why not say, hey, you know a lot about bike/pedestrian issues in growing cities, why don't you write a column? Take out the middleman. Yes, I admit it, it is free labor, but I'm a one woman newsroom...We're able to say, Okay, no more gatekeeper. Go for it." Nolan: Getting people to write who don't do it for a living can be very difficult. What is My Dog Harriet? Courtney Lowery: "The phrase citizen journalism disenfranchises everybody we're trying to include." Might be true...but it's probably too late now...once a name sticks, it's very hard to get it unstuck. Names are linguistic Krazy Glue. Barbara Serrano, LA Times: "If anybody would like to write for the LA Times, you can email me." Nolan: What would a good pitch to the Op-Ed page look like? Serrano: "Very bloglike, email is good, it's easier to get through to an editor via email than by phone, write like you would write on your blog, and be persistent...and we really need women badly...As Lisa Stone says, we have a Supreme Court blog and there are no women on it... Guy whose name I don't know: "I was online editor at the Bay Guardian, and the fact is, most newspapers pay shit...If you want someone to contribute who's not a professional writer, ask them to send something that's not perfect and edit it. So one thing to do is find editors who will work with you. Realize that they're overstressed, but that there are a lot of editors who want to find new writers to work with." Bay Guardian guy: A lot of what's in blogging has been around in the alternative and underground press for forty years...so read some histories of the alternative years...And the daily papers have to realize that the alternative press has been writing "fuck" for forty years and civilization has not fallen." |
Last modified: Monday, August 01, 2005 at 12:51 AM.
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