Occam’s Razor

Some more thoughts on blogging, and its future

In a couple months, I will have been blogging for three years. In Internet time, this is practically a lifetime. Many will try blogging but few will keep it up. No wonder. Even if your blog is just a stream of consciousness mostly for the amusement of you and your friends, it still takes time to put the words down and publish them. In my case, since I set a high standard for myself, most entries require quite a bit of thought, research and editing. This means they take considerable time. Since I also have a full time job and duties as a husband and father, (Wednesday, for example, was Back to School Night) finding the time to put together a good blog entry even every other day is challenging.

Thus I am somewhat in awe of those who can spew out lots of very good content on a more frequent basis. I am not sure where they find the time. I figure they are either independently wealthy, have a part time job, unemployed, or single. On the other hand, in order to blog perhaps they steal a lot of time from their employer. I do not do this. Aside from the ethical implications, I simply do not have the time. My job is very much a full time occupation. It could easily consume the rest of my personal life if I let it.

To write an excellent topical blog entry usually requires constantly sniffing through the blogosphere. In addition, I assume the best bloggers are reading lots of news articles and opinion pieces online and in print. These are necessary habits for those who want to be taken seriously. Perhaps these habits become second nature if you are a journalist, which I am not. All of these necessary activities take even more time. This makes it all the more remarkable when a blogger can put it altogether and consistently write excellent blog entries.

This is why I admire Billmon. I have written about the power of Dailykos.com. Kos is a huge progressive political site but to call it a blog is ridiculous. I know its owner Marcos keeps touting it as a blog. Sorry, it is not. It is better described as a “megablog”, allowing pretty much anyone to post one of two “diaries” a day, each of which amount to a blog entry. It is also a discussion community. Without allowing people to comment on stories and diaries, it would be a practically useless site. In short, Kos exists for the progressive blogosphere to talk about issues of the day.

Occasionally it actually goes beyond talking and generates real and effective action. Cindy Sheehan is one result of the Kos phenomenon. Cindy is the antiwar mother who lost her son Casey in Iraq. She spent August in a ditch outside of Bush’s ranch in Texas, and was encouraged and empowered by the Kos community. I do not think she would have done what she did without so many of us cheering her on. Cindy like the rest of us hangs out regularly on Kos, and most days posts a diary discussing her concerns and feelings. She often replies to people who leave comments on her diaries.

While Kos and some of his other authors often provide insightful diaries, they often feel rushed and not very well thought through. That is not true of Billmon and his site “The Whiskey Bar.” Billmon will also put out short blog entries, although he tends toward fewer and longer blog entries. I, and most of his barflies, hang around for the longer entries. His political analyses are just jaw dropping excellent. He can write not just coherently, but in a way that engages and amuses the reader. I hit many political blogs and Billmon stands by far above the crowd. He is truly a blog phenomenon. In fact, he is better than any political columnist I have read. If his entries were perhaps a touch less snarky then he could easily find himself as a columnist syndicated worldwide. He is that good. In addition to his essays, he is also a Photoshop whiz. His entries are often adorned with clever Photshopped images, many of which are hysterical.

If these attributes were not enough, his mind seems to be an encyclopedia. Billmon remembers quotes going back decades and can juxtapose old and modern quotes in a way I have never seen before. He sees patterns that most of us cannot see. While I am sure he makes frequent use of search engines like Google, using search engines effectively also requires a deep understanding of the problem domain. Billmon has it.

Blogging thus has the potential to liberate otherwise unheard of voices and give them some prominence. Sadly, many good bloggers get almost no readers. Content alone is no guarantee someone can jump out of the blog pack. It also requires people to find your blog and recommend it to others. I do not expect this blog, however good that I hope its content is, will get beyond a backwater blog.

Huffingtonpost, Arianna Huffington’s blog community, is pointing to perhaps a new blogging model for others to emulate. It is a collection of blogs, with the common theme being that posters are friends or friends of friends of Arianna. Arianna, of course, is rich and has prominent liberal friends including politicians and celebrities. Getting them to put out their own stories straight to the public makes a lot of sense. (I suspect that many of her authors are wise enough to have their works edited by others before posting.) Many of her celebrity bloggers already seem to have tired of blogging, but that is okay. It was sufficient to launch her site, and now it has its own buzz, as well as a fair amount of news.

While there are blog aggregator sites out there like blogspot.com, the bloggers there have nothing in common. Blogs on such sites range from excellent to dreadful. A choosy blog consumer like me would prefer to go to one site where we know the blog authors will be first rate. That is why I think Billmon should set up a megablog site like huffingtonpost.com. It should consist of only the best of the best bloggers. Billmon would be the lead blogger, of course, and its feature attraction. However, he could host a much larger community of top rated bloggers, all of whom have demonstrated his unique gifts of eloquence and insight.

Such a megablog should, in my opinion, not be strictly a political blog site. It should include areas that offer insight into the whole range of human experience. For example, I have a significant metaphysical category on my blog, the result of a lot of thought and a fair amount of reading. I do not think I am the best blogger in this area by any means, but such a megablog would include perhaps a couple premier bloggers in the metaphysics area.

With this model, consumers would get a simpler way of finding excellent content. I also think that bloggers, or at least those that rise to the top, would have a means of making a living off their hobby. Because this proposed site, like Kos, would either support targeted advertising or allow users to pay to opt out of advertising.

I am not sure how bloggers would be chosen for such a site. Perhaps criteria would include user input, existing page views and a committee that examines potential contributors. The criteria though should be very high. If the blogger cannot write coherently then they should not be hosted. Indeed, they need to be able to write very well, use authoritative sources and have expertise in their domain. For example, Juan Cole and Josh Marshall both have gravitas in their spheres of influence, and can speak with some authority. Both would be logical choices for contributors to this megablog.

I do not think this would kill the rest of the blogosphere. Technorati will still be out there. However, just as The Well was, at one time, an oasis of sanity in the online universe, so one of more megablog sites could also be useful, easily separating content worth our time from the dreck that sadly comprises much of the blogosphere.

As for Billmon, if you have not read him you are missing a real treat. While I think I may occasionally write a better entry than Billmon, and while I certainly tackle a lot more on this blog than just politics, no one does progressive political blogging better. Moreover, I doubt anyone else will. I just hope Billmon can keep it up. He is a blogging treasure.

September 30th, 2005 at 12:23pm Posted by Mark | Technology | one comment

Why I Blog

Writing was my one passion during my restless youth. There was only one problem: I was not very good at it. I was not a bad writer. English teachers often flattered me. It is probably accurate to say that I was better at writing than most my age. The truth was that I had more enthusiasm than talent. If I had any extra time during my hectic youth (for I was also working part time), I was at the keys of my Smith Corona constantly writing and rewriting the same science fiction novel.

For more than twenty years, I gave writing short shrift. Now many years later, I am blogging. I stopped writing because real life left me few alternatives. I had a career to ascend and a family to support. Still, I would find my creativity bubbling over in unexpected places. No one else but me wrote florid IEEE Concept of Operations documents. I could make the most dreadful engineering documents interesting. Invariably every performance review would come back with some words praising me for my writing.

I do not know the wellspring of my creativity. However, since I started blogging in late 2002 I have been unable to stop. My inner writer has been trying to escape for decades and it finally succeeded. Blogging gave me a publishing medium that I could not imagine in the 70s.

On an average day I get about three hundred of you to stop by and sniff my blog. I do not know if you enjoy the time here, are annoyed, or just glance at it and move on. According to my site statistics program Awstats, about 80% of you are the surf and move on type, hanging around for thirty seconds or less. This does not surprise me. The web is ideal for those with short attention spans. More surprisingly, Awstats tells me that about 12% of you this month have spent thirty minutes or more at a time at my site. Nearly 5% have spent more than an hour at a time reading my blog.

This surprises me and makes me smile. While I write for my enjoyment (and whatever stimulation it gives my visitors), I write also for those few of you who will read an entry from start to finish. Why? Certainly, vanity and ego are part of my calculus. No one wants to feel unvalued.

For the most part, I write because I must. Now that my writing side has reemerged, it will not go back into the cage. Many evenings, even when I would rather be doing something else, I am dutifully at the keyboard creating a blog entry. Some days the writing flows naturally. On other days, the writing is like wrestling with an alligator. Thinking up topics is not always easy. Sometimes I am reduced to writing about topics that are really quite trivial. I wonder if anyone but me really wants to read about my travails with my mother. Apparently, some people actually do, and I am both surprised and flattered when these types of entries bring comments.

Blogging has made the cost of publishing and distribution trivial. The one thing it has not done for me is make writing profitable. That will likely elude me. Since I write primarily for my own enjoyment and my full time job keeps me flush, this does not bother me. To make money at blogging I would have to pick a genre and plumb it endlessly. Blogads suggests as much and says that you need at least a thousand unique visitors a day in order to attract advertisers. Even if I did have advertisers, any money I collected would be pocket change. Those who make a living from blogging are rare. The only one I know who does it successfully is Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the man who created DailyKos.com. (Moreover, he does not have a blog. He has a megablog.) However, like most successful blogs, his is successful because he focuses on a single topic: progressive politics. If he wrote entries like mine, he would be just another faceless blogger. His blog would not generate enough lift to fly.

No, Occam’s Razor does not want to be not your ordinary blog. I am multifaceted and complex so my blog is a potpourri of topics and ideas. I flit from subject to subject. Nevertheless, I try hard to provide insights or perspectives that you cannot find anywhere else.

I put a lot of work into every blog entry. Generally, an entry is two pages and sometimes three pages in length. Research may take additional time. A short blog entry will take two hours. A long blog entry will take three hours or more. For my blog entries are never dashed out. They are crafted.

Like an sculptor carving a statue from a large block of wood, I start out not quite sure how my entry will end. During my first pass, I try to write quickly. The second pass is the hardest. This is where the artisanship comes in. Now I need to turn what is often a stream of consciousness into something that feels a bit poetic. This means meticulously parsing words, rearranging sentences, and often rewriting paragraphs of text. During the third edit, I carefully look at my text again. Is a word too general? Can another word be more descriptive? Is the tone consistent? Am I restating myself? I find that I restate myself a lot. I often have to fight the urge leave in uninteresting details. Just because they interest me does not mean they will necessarily interest you. I also find myself frequently writing with a passive voice. I try to rephrase my words when this happens, but writing in the passive voice seems to be my style. I also try to keep my sentences short so they are more readily digested.

Since I construct my essays, I use the right tools. The right tool at the moment is Microsoft Word. Of course, I leave on both the spell checker and the grammar checker. Word often suggests words and phrases. I will consider every suggestion that its grammar checker makes. If I have a peeve with bloggers, it is how few of them can be bothered to spell check their writing. Have they so little consideration for their readers?

The fourth pass through is the most tedious. By this time, I am growing bored with my own entry. I just want to be done. Nevertheless, as I change and rework words I keep finding minor mistakes. They must be patched before publishing. It is impossible to write a perfect blog entry of any depth in a couple hours. However, my standards require a high degree of workmanship. I will not put out what I consider crap. I will not put out a B or a C entry. My hope is that if a blog critic were sniffing through my entries then any entry would get a B+ or better. I shoot for the A. Of course, I do not really know for sure how well my entries are received unless someone leave a comment. All I know is I have to be proud of them.

After four passes, I copy and paste the text from Word into a text editor. It fixes most of the text that should not show up in HTML, like smart quotes. I then copy the plain text into my MovableType blog entry screen. URLs and italicized text are all added manually. (I bold links in Word to remind myself to link to them.) Finally, I publish the entry. Even after all this editing, I will read the entry online too. Seeing it in a different context invariably helps me find that one missing typo I could not otherwise see.

I suspect that my blogging is not an end unto itself but a means toward some nebulous writing future. Perhaps someday I will write that great American novel. Until then I have blogging. Rather than have my ideas crash around inside my head, at least they now have a way to escape. In articulating my thoughts, they gain clarity and order. For me blogging is also a form of therapy.

I hope you enjoy your time here. In addition, I hope it is apparent that Occam’s Razor is a work of devotion and passion. Perhaps it is as immortal as I am ever going to be. While I am unlikely to succeed as an author, it is also likely that with computers my words will outlive me. They will be archived and indexed, read, parsed and maybe even enjoyed (albeit less frequently) by future generations. With so much noise out there in the blogging world, perhaps Occam’s Razor will be perceived as a small but flawed diamond in the rough amongst in a sea of sand. I hope so.

July 21st, 2005 at 10:35pm Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | 2 comments

Danger Will Robinson

My wife has been part of a community of Slash writers and readers for about four years now.

In case you don’t know, Slash is a form of fan fiction that accentuates implied same sex longings of established characters in TV shows and movies. It started with the original Star Trek series. Kirk and Spock appeared to many people, women in particular, to be a bit more than good friends. Kirk/Spock, get it? Erotic fan fiction started appearing at Star Trek conventions everywhere in the form of “zines”. Zines are fan fiction stories loosely bound together, often sloppily assembled and edited and sold at cost. Based on early “Slash” zines it appeared that Kirk and Spock had deep feelings and sexual longings for each other, at least in the minds of a largely female population of fans. In numerous Slash stories there are many a tender and not so tender homosexual act between these principle characters where the full depth of their soul is endlessly plumbed. There are probably millions of Slash stories on Kirk/Spock alone out there.

From such humble beginnings a genre was spawned. My wife got into it as a result of watching “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” movie. She was a huge Star Wars fan from the beginning. She found some Phantom Menace fan fiction stories on the internet, enjoyed them, and started writing and corresponding with a number of fellow fans. Before long though it was the slash stories she was mostly reading and writing. In the movie Obi-Wan is an apprentice to Qui-Gon. The female fans of the Star War series went nuts imagining erotic power play between these two characters. There are numerous web sites, fan fiction archives and mailing lists just for this one erotic fandom alone. Yes, the Internet is a beautiful place where virtually any need can be gratified.

For fans of female erotica there is perhaps a lot to be admired about this genre. I always knew women were a lot more erotic than they often let on, even in private between the sheets. A lot of these stories would make sailors blush. Most male pornography is just graphic. These stories are not just graphic, but rife with deep emotions and conflicts as the relationships between these same sex pairings invariably gets deeper and deeper. It’s a shame, in a way, that it is an art form I can’t appreciate very much. Being a heterosexual male I find reading endless stories of two guys (and sometimes two gals, such as Xena/Gabrielle) get it on and having heavy relationship conversations just doesn’t do much to trip my trigger.

My wife Terri wrote a very successful series called “Wheel of If”, based on the Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon relationship. Just last week it was formally published and released to the Slash universe as a zine for those who want to part with thirty bucks or so. It was an effort of love for her and it generated a lot of comments and a lot of fan mail. And now finally it is in zine form, with many full color illustrations by talented artists. She is a published author, of a sort. She beat me to it. In that sense I am a bit jealous. But I’m also proud of her because she is a terrific writer.

This weekend she returned from a slash convention in California full of fellow slash writers and fans, many of which are into her two fandoms. Her other fandom is “The Sentinel”. These two fandoms alone so consumes her she has no energy to join another. I am grateful she stopped at two, but that doesn’t stop lots of other women. It would not be an exaggeration to say lots of slash writers and readers are addicted to this world they are in. I often feel like my wife is right on the borderline. I don’t feel capable of making an accurate assessment because I am not a clinical psychologist nor am I particularly unbiased in the matter.

She has naturally made lots of friends in this new world, to the point where most of her friends now come from her Slash world. I have enjoyed meeting a number of them. Back in 2000 my wife even sponsored a big party for her friends at our house. (I was wisely out of town that weekend). Most live far away, but a number live within commuting range. A couple of her friends make it to the house every month or two and have enjoyed dinner with us, or have camped out in our spare room.

The Slash world is populated with interesting, but often very troubled women. My wife is a bit strange in that she is quite heterosexual in a domain full of lesbian and bisexual women. As a general rule men don’t write or read much Slash. Those that do enjoy it tend to be homosexual men.

The good points about the women I have met into this universe are that they are very bright and creative people as a rule. My wife is certainly that way. She is also an excellent writer who could probably be a successful writer if she wanted to channel her energies in other directions. But these women are often very troubled. Some are in bad marriages. Some have no marriage prospects at all or even want to be married. Lots are into role playing, or would like to be in submissive-dominant relationships. Many are overweight. Many have large self-esteem issues. Many, probably most based on my observation, suffer from clinical depression. And it’s no surprise that many of these women are struggling with mixed feelings for their own sex. But there are also a fair number of otherwise ordinary women who just enjoy Slash as their hobby.

At four years this newest obsession of hers shows no signs of ebbing, so I am likely going to have to deal with it for the long term. It is not always easy because I often feel she loses herself in the genre, sometimes to the expense of her obligations as spouse and mother. It is my nature to be supportive and encouraging, so I try not to complain too much. In many ways she is a happier creature, having found an online home and a set of friends with similar interests I don’t think she has ever had before.

But I wonder how healthy it is. It seems to my myopic eyes to be an obsession. I see an addictive nature to it, just like gambling. It’s almost compulsive. Given any free time she will almost always choose to spend it in that universe.

I’m not sure what conclusions to make from all this. My initial impression was that Slash was pornography for women. But it’s more than that I think: it’s an expression for a longing for a sort of relationship that is probably impossible in real life.

Whatever she is getting from it, it is something I apparently cannot supply. But I still wonder what it is about the genre that draws so many women into it, and makes them so compulsive about spending so many of their free hours imbibed in it? I’d like to think it is harmless. Perhaps it is just another low level vice. But it brings out my inner robot:

Danger Will Robinson!

February 25th, 2003 at 01:04pm Posted by Mark | Life 2003 | one comment