Category: Blogging

Jay Tea at Wizbang! reminds us about Stephen Den Beste’s categorization of bloggers as:

• Thinkers, who write essays and whatnot.
• Linkers, who post links and say, “Heh.” or “Indeed.”

However, this simple dichotomy overlooks the third type of blogger: the lister.

The lister type of blogger:

• Embraces the numbered or bulleted list as a means of communication.
• Often dashes off lists of related items important to the blogger.
• Relates favorites in movie or music, often specializing in:
  • One
  • The other
  • Both
• Participates in and spread “memes” which contain lists of questions or simple lists for other bloggers to fill out.

The beauties of the list blog include:

• Not needing to assemble complete paragraphs; all you need is a topic sentence or a topic fragment.
• Lists easily translatable into PowerPoint presentations, with neat transition effects.
• Take up lots of vertical space on the blog, ensuring that the content column is longer than the blogroll.
• Could make blogger as famous, wealthy, and respected as Chris White.

These blogs show signs of listery from time to time:

• A Small Victory
• Protein Wisdom
• Overtaken by Events
• Rocket Jones
• IMAO
• Wizbang!
• Musings from Brian J. Noggle
• Electric Venom

So the thinkers and linkers polar axis needs to accommodate a new dimension: those of us who don’t necessarily think nor necessarily link but do, in fact, blog incessantly.

Great minds move in tandem? Who knows?

All I know is that Inaniloquent and Dustbury both mentioned the Champaign County Rifle Association‘s Burma Shavesque signs yesterday.

What are the odds of that?

Wow, it looks as though each post I put up yesterday overwrote the preceding entry, so instead of 3 posts, you only get the last one, and that’s not without some work since Blogger wants to overwrite it with this post.

Allow me to assure you that you are definitely missing out on a lot of my eloquence, but rest assured that the only post that displays for yesterday is in fact probably the best.

I guess I shall have to return to the habit of saving all of my posts outside of Blogger. Again.

Crikey, I need to go to bed.

No more posts until tomorrow. You have been warned!

(Man, all the cool blogs go onto hiatus from time to time. I just want to fit in.)

Bekijken is an esoteric, underground Dutch martial art practiced by people named Inga and Sven.

The Carnival of Vanities. This week with cat pictures.

Blog nirvana.

William Squire (not to be confused with Billy Squier) opines about those who think all charity starts at the state capital:

Bible teachings, much like the lessons from any religion, are designed as a guide for your personal life. The Bible is not a behavioral guide for state and federal governments. Governments have limited jurisdictions and powers. By reducing state overhead, and avoiding tax increases, Matt Blunt leaves money in your pocket to contribute to charity in any way you, or your religion deem appropriate.

Preach on, brother. But would it kill you to throw in a guitar solo?

Unfortunately, the governor doesn’t seem to have elaborated for whom taxpayers’ dollars should be used to purchase sexual performance drugs.

Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times, today:

Sometimes this job is too easy. That whooshing noise you heard Tuesday was every pundit north of St. Louis lunging for a keyboard to heap ridicule on Gov. Blagojevich for his “testicular virility” quip.

But what about Aaron? He’s not north of St. Louis. Perhaps Steinberg doesn’t think Aaron is a pundit like he (Steinberg) is.

Lileks today:

“You have FOUR STAR WARS?” Gnat asked. “Wow.”

There are actually five – well, six. But I sold the first one.

“Why?”

“Because it was an embarrassing piece of tripe.”

“What’s tripe?”

“It’s a kind of fish.”

Everyone except Lileks, and now his daughter, knows that tripe is cattle guts.

I’m not too proud to LOUDLY CORRECT MISINFORMATION IN THE MAINSTREAMISH MEDIA! I am a BLOGGER! It’s what I do to feel better about myself!

I’ve been skimming David Greenberg’s rather disagreeable posts at Daniel Drezner.com and quietly disagreed them. Little did I realize that Greenberg’s excursion into the blogosphere was an anthropoorelitist study where he was Dian Fossey and we were the gorillas. He’s published his findings in the peer-reviewed New York Times:

As I checked other sites for ideas, I now realized that I didn’t need only new information. I needed a gimmick – a motif or a running joke that would keep the blog rolling all week. All of a sudden, I was reading other blogs, not for what they had to say, but for how they said it.

And:

It’s not that the readers were dim. Some forced me to refine or clarify my arguments. But the responses certainly got reductive, very quickly. And for all the individuality that blogs are supposed to offer, there was an amazing amount of groupthink – since some of them were getting their talking points from … other blogs.

By the end of the week, with other deadlines looming and my patience exhausted, I began to post less and less. There was a piece for Slate due, a book chapter to finish, my baby boy, Leo, to entertain and a piece to write for the Week in Review.

So you see, while he enjoyed his trips to the darkest underbelly of commentary, he had real work to do, and with regret could no longer post to the low quality standards he’d set for himself and the presumably knuckle-dragging readership and commentariat.

Nothing like a little slumming to shore up your liberal cred. Oh, I know, it’s under the guise of broadening your horizons or trying something new. If you perform the task with the idea that it will confirm your preconceptions, though, you’re probably right–but your horizons are no more broad, and you’ve really only tried the same old thing.

More at:

• Outside the Beltway
• Pejmanesque
• Patterico’s Pontifications

All right, have at it, gentle reader, but understand that I can and will arbitrarily remove comments for any reason I want.

Because that’s my name at the top of the page.

1. Content not locked behind subscription/ads.

As is often the case, I follow a day featuring an Instalanche with a day of nothing, just so I can sqander those residual hitz on emptiness.

Still, you could always click over to Draft Matt Blunt 2008 to see some of the reasons why Missouri Governor Matt Blunt would make a good president in 2008. Here are two to start:

1. He’s not Rod Blagojevich.
2. He’s not Jim Doyle.

Happy Star Wars Day from Michele Catalano.

I don’t normally read left-of-center blogs, but I find Blame Bush! oddly compelling….