experiments and interesting stuff

I've been seeing some interesting moves in your blog postings this week. Here's a list:

- Immediacy. One hallmarks of blogging is blogging to the present moment, blogging about what's happening to the blogger right now! Some posts even blog right up to the moment of posting - a narrative move common in epistolary novels. Overcoffee has an example.

- FantaColor is using a single post to put two topics in conjunction with one another. The tradition is One Post - One Topic. But put two topics in one post and you suggest that they connect and interact in some way, like this one.

- Here's a multi-media essay: a focused, occasional, hybrid text that pulls together Blondie's own text with some images and a video - Ree-says v Ree-cees. (Some of us are starting to teach hybrid texts in College Writing, so Blondie is ahead of the pack). The post is also an example of viral marketing. Blondie has written an ad for Reese's. This is the kind of thing marketeers want consumers to do: become product-based content providers.

- Blood Pudding. Interesting for how Sir Andrew motivates the entry: it came out of seeing Blood’s pic - which he includes as a link. But it’s also good in that is stay with the topic long enough to do it - and the writer - justice, like this:

I think, as a reader of blogs, I prefer the notebook, described by Blood as "sometimes personal, sometimes focused on the outside world, [they] are distinguished from blogs by their longer pieces of focused content." This sounds like a healthy middle way between the self-indulgent, episodic Blog and the cold, filtered, er, filter (not the kind of cold-filtered that goes smooth over everything, but the impersonal harbinger of other websites and links of interest).

- Some of you are commenting on how difficult it can be to post every day. Grant for instance. It can be tough to find something to say until you develop a routine (coffee - check email - read news - blog - repeat). We’ll talk about some strategies bloggers use to get started and to compose and organize at the same time. And I’ll post a prompt or two now and then that you might find useful.

- One approach to developing a routine is to post an annotated To Do, like this - or even just a simple little list. Posting your to do publicly sort of commits you to fulfilling it, yes?

- In blogging, even seemingly mundane observations take on significance when they are isolated in a short post, with a pointed comment, like this one: short and pointed.

Keep the postings coming. Keep warm.