twist of fait accomplis

Living in the Blog-osphere (Newsweek)

Though I was interviewed for this article—by e-mail and by phone—I don't appear. Paul pointed out that they did mention my Golden Girls blog, though (it's part of the "dark matter"!). Oh well... at least Barbara was quoted!

Anyway... thoughts on the article itself: it's alright. With a number of researchers working on the story, I thought it might go beyond the typical "Introduction to Blogging" article the mainstream press has been echoing over and over the past six months. But, it doesn't. And I guess that's OK, as long as Newsweek follows up later with a more in-depth look at blogging and its possibilities.

I've posted the e-mail portion of the interview, so feel free to click through and read my semi-coherent take on blogging.

When did you start blogging?

I first dipped my toe in the blogging pool in April of 2000, but started my current personal blog in July of 2000 and have been going strong ever since. :) I actually have a number of blogs, but "twist of fait accomplis" (laze.net/fait/) is the main one... one of the other one that gets a lot of my attention is the Veg Blog (www.vegblog.org), a blog about vegetarianism. I somewhat ashamedly admit that I even have a blog about the Golden Girls. ;)

I've had a personal web site much longer than my blog, though, dating back to December 1994 when I was a freshman in college.

How often do you blog?

Daily (or more), though I tend to take the weekends off, limiting myself to the occasional e-mail check.

Do you worry about unintended people reading what you post?

I try not to write anything that I wouldn't mind a.) a total stranger, b.) someone from my work, or c.) my mom reading. And that's a good thing, because all three of those read my blog. :)

Do your friends blog? Do you read each other's blogs?

A few of my "real world" friends blog, yes, and we're all linked up to each other and read each others' regularly. It's a way of keeping in touch, even if it is in a more public forum than e-mail or on the phone. It's kind of like getting together in a restaurant with a group of friends: smaller groups will have conversations amongst themselves, those groups will change and morph a bit over the course of a meal, and some people from outside the group will inevitably listen in.

Have you ever had any private stuff posted that wound up getting "public" in an unintened way -- for example, you wrote something about someone and then they read about it online?

Anything I post to my website, I try to consider that it's likely to be read by the person I wrote about. I've never posted anything that would hurt or really embarrass another person, but I think that comes down to the type of personality you have more than anything... if you're the type to talk behind people's backs, you'll be just as likely to mention something in your blog that someone else might consider private.

What blogs do you read or admire?

I think when Mena Trott started dollarshort.org early last year, it was one of the best blogs I've ever seen. Mena really let her personality shine through and she shared a lot of embarrassing stories from her childhood that I could relate to. It was like talking with an old friend, except that it was someone I never met before and didn't even speak directly to until several months after. I always enjoyed reading her posts each morning. Her site's still great, but she's been busy working on Movable Type (a very popular content management system/blog publishing system) with her husband.

For pure comedy, I love Mecawilson (mecawilson.com). The full list of blogs I read on a regular basis can be seen on the sidebar at laze.net/fait/.

Paul at phonezilla.net was my main inspiration, though. He had an online journal and blog before I did, so I followed his lead. He and I have an interesting history to begin with: we met each other online back in 1991, when I was 15 (and he was 12 or 13). We kept in touch off and on over the years and really started communicating a lot more in 1999. We launched a collaborative site (dailyping.com), which is kind of blog-like. But even after a decade of having known each other online, we had never even spoken on the phone! Then, last year, we finally met in person -- when he came to my wedding! :) Tangential, but it goes to show how getting to know someone online can often be as fulfilling as making a friend in the "real world."

Have other bloggers found yours and made a link? What would/do you think about that?

The blog community seems to form little clusters, with a strange interconnectedness that can lead a visitor all over the place, to people with totally disparate personalities. I love it when someone comes across my blog (or I come across theirs) and we become regular visitors of each other's sites. I've met a number of people from my general geographical area because of blogs they run -- one guy lives a block away from me, but we didn't get to know each other until we started reading each other's blog! I've met people from thousands of miles away for the same reason. The blog community ties together a wide variety of personal sites that may have never had any other relation if it weren't for their online journals and blogs.

Do you ever get bored with blogging?

Not really, but I can see why some bloggers do. You can tell when you're reading a blog and it's updated every two hours (or more!) during the day that the writer is really excited about having a blog, communicating their thoughts, etc. etc.. They burn themselves out quickly.

I've tried to make my blogs extensions of my regular thought process, so that they're not some extraneous thing that feel like a chore. Rather, they're a natural part of how I communicate, how I organize my thoughts, how I flex my writing muscle.

I don't feel bad if I take a few days away from my blog, and I think that helps. If I ever started feeling that my blog was an "obligation" rather than something I really enjoyed doing, that's when I might start getting bored with it.

Do you think about ways you could make money with it?

On a personal level, no. However, I've recently become excited by the idea of corporate blogging on both intranets and public web sites. I've started to implement a test run of a few intranet blogs at my company (Cigital, www.cigital.com). I think that blogs can serve as an excellent impromptu knowledge management system on both the personal and corporate levels.

On a semi-related note, I've participated in the last two Blogathons (www.blogathon.org), a blog-for-charity event run by Cat from frykitty.com. A couple hundred bloggers blogged for 24 hours straight to raise money for charity. The first year brought in over $20,000 and this year over $58,000! I, personally, raised $1000 over the two-year period and was part of this year's organizing team. While it's not "raising money" in the traditional sense, a lot of money did go to charities because of the weblog community's effort.

A phone interview followed a couple of days later where I was asked about TrackBacking and an awful lot about my Golden Girls blog.