Am I the only one who is getting annoyed with Boing Boing‘s obsession with porn stories? There are interesting stories to be told about the porn industry, but Boing Boing’s current efforts are all a bit too hipster for me. The general tone of these things has that sort of arch amusement, detached irony that I hate intensely, not to mention that I get the feeling that the Boingsters are getting a bit too impressed with their own cleverness.
Meta
You gotta laugh
This is how the Guardian described Alister Black’s blog in their latest article on political blogs:
A neatly designed blog with extensive photo galleries. Alister Black’s site has many good points, and covers “conspiracy theory” stories the mainstream media doesn’t usually touch.
Conspiracy theories?
The icing on the cake? He was located in the centrist section…
Because sometimes you just feel like bitching
Right now, for instance. Barry links to a newish blog called Unimpressed, which is subtitled Because Style Over Substance is Unacceptable. A pity then that the blog’s design is somewhat of a triumph of style over substance:
- The layout is fairly standard, with the page divided into three columns, but the lefthand column is unused.
- The middle column, which contain the posts is far too narrow and doesn’t read comfortably. Worse, it has a fixed, unadjustable width.
- But the worst thing is, there’s a huge amount of space wasted in the header of the page, with the posts only starting “below the fold” of the webpage. That is, you actually have to scroll down to read the first post; when you first see the page all you see is the header! The comments popup has the same problem, btw.
These problems are easily fixed of course and I hope they will be, as it’s a shame to let style ruin a blog whose substance doesn’t deserve that.
UPDATE: I’ve put up a screenshot of the blog below to make clear what I mean.
UPDATE the second: The blog looks normal now. Excellent.
Keep on blogging in the real world
This week, Shelley of Burningbird has been blogging for two years. To commemorate this, she provided a little history of her blog, doing the usual musing one does at those events, in the course of which she wrote this:
Remember Tubby the Cat? The quizzes? Googlewhacking? Those were the days, weren’t they? All of a sudden now, weblogging is News. Capital ‘N’ news. Serious stuff.
For instance, NBC news just had a story tonight on warblogs. They did a Google search on the term ‘warblog’ and mentioned that over 300,000 entries show up. They showed the Google results, and PapaScott, you showed up in the results! Did you know you were on national US TV tonight?
Before it was cats. Now it’s war. I’m not sure this is an improvement. The intimate little party, the golden age when we could write unemcumbered by the real world is over. Knock, knock. The world wants in.
I can understand where Shelley’s coming from, but I think she’s wrong here. Has it ever been possible to “write unemcumbered by the real world”, without shutting your eyes to it? I never had this golden age, as the weblogs I followed from the beginning were all too involved with the real world of politics and war, as my own are too. What’s happening now is not new; though it is certainly more pervasive.
Apart from that, happy anniversary, Burningbird and I wish I had known you earlier.
Happy birthday
This very blog just turned one today. In that time, I’ve posted approx. 140 entries, or one every two and a half days or so.
Not very interesting, I know, but I thought I shouldn’t let the day pass without comment.