Tag: blogging

blogging-setup

The above layout has given me an effective routine for writing longer posts. It’s iA Writer set up to mimic a dual-panel Markdown editor. Markdown isn’t for everyone but it works really well for how my brain processes text and ideas. The existing gap in iA Writer, for me, is some means of natively hooking it up to my blog.

Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

At some point (probably one we’ve already passed), weblog technology will be seen as a platform for so many forms of publishing, filtering, aggregation, and syndication that blogging will stop referring to any particularly coherent activity. The term ‘blog’ will fall into the middle distance, as ‘home page’ and ‘portal’ have, words that used to mean some concrete thing, but which were stretched by use past the point of meaning.

Clay Shirky writing in 2003. Pretty prescient considering that’s 12 years ago.

Am I a Blogger? An edited version of danah boyd’s talk at Blogher this year.

What blogging was:

A home page was a painting, a statue. My blog was me. My blog was the Web equivalent of my body. Being-on-the-Web was turning out to be even more important and more fun than we’d thought it would be.

How to activate faculty to fuel your content. Great set of tips for motivating consistent blogging among faculty.

Measure successful blogging in years. Success in blogging is largely about showing up each day and writing. Piece by piece you’ll create something great.

Author Marks is a simple JavaScript resource allowing authors to highlight certain portions of their writing. Matt Gemmell writes about the idea on his blog. Not something I would use but it’s cool to see experiments with this type of stuff.

Why grad schools should require students to blog. Great post about the impact consistent, public writing has upon dissertation work.

Mid-week reading list

With the craziness of running a WordCamp last week I didn’t have much time to read through my Instapaper queue. Thankfully, I had some extra time to catch up on things tonight. Interestingly I had a lot of articles that hit on similar themes. Last week seemed to be the week to publish pieces about publishing.

Scott Hanselman’s Your words are wasted was first up. It speaks to my belief in the importance of open source software and owning what you publish. As he says, “I control this domain, this software and this content.”

It’s been a while since I’ve read something from the Nieman Lab but I think I need to start following them more closely again. 13 ways of looking at Medium was well done. They save the critical questions for the end and there could have been more of those, but it’s an interesting look at Ev Williams’ new publishing tool.

The Dangers of Being a Product Instead of a Customer was another good post. As Diego writes there, “I’d much rather be a customer of web services than a product.”

Anil Dash’s musing on streams was interesting as a somewhat higher level piece. People do read on the internet, they just require content to be presented in the right way.

Interesting stuff going on.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, while attending this weekend’s WordCamp:

Blogging is beautiful, it elevates the human spirit and enriches public life…I remember discovering how easy it was to blog, not so many years ago, and I really hope that lots of people are still discovering how easy and how rewarding it is every day today.