OK, today is Day 7 of my “Blog a Day” project, and I’ve learned a few lessons:
- The title is totally misleading! Some days I’ve written about two or even three sites. With school starting next week (I’m teaching three classes) and me moving the same week, things are liable to get rather more sporadic. Think of the “Blog a Day” moniker more as a sort of Platonic Ideal (though I am generally in no way a Platonist) rather than a real-world condition.
- It’s really hard! It’s like wondering why I hate tomatoes but love salsa — who can explain matters of taste? Some sites I like just because of the author’s personality, their writing stsyle, a certain je ne sais quai in how they express themselves. Take Burningbird, a site that’s on my list for today (or tomorrow, depending on how together I am today) — for some reason, I just click with the site — it’s got great design, it’s well-written. I don’t necessarily agree with or even like the things she says, at least not all of them. There’s a certain inexplicable something. Here’s a better analogy — why do you love your partner? Other sites, like BoingBoing, also on the list for today, are hard to sum up becuase they’re so damn good at what they do — what could I possibly say about them that isn’t already clear to everyone in the universe?
- Attrition sucks. I’ve skipped a few sites because they hadn’t been updated for months and months. The first one like this, action figures sold separately, I reviewed, but after a couple more popped up in my blogroll, I decided it wasn’t worth the effort. These bloggers may just be out of the loop for a while, but… I’m removing them from my blogroll, too (although not till I’ve finished this round of blogging a blog a day). The irony, of course, is that my own site was stagnant for so long — by my own criteria, I should be removed from consideration.
- Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes.
- This is a damn good way to fulfill some of the promise I see in the social Internet. I write about somoene, they see my site in their referral logs, they visit and see themselves written about — warm fuzzies all around! Blogrolls are nice, but they’re impersonal; I think that writing about why I blogroll someone adds the personal touch on which, as the Cluetrainers might say, conversations happen. So there’s that.
Future lessons to be posted as they happen.
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