If I wrote and edited technology stories for a living, I too would make every effort to flog my own weblog. Self-promotion in a tech-culture must be a lot about zeitgeist-surfing. As it is, I nearly have a career path again, suddenly. I’m a community-producer / expert with vast numbers of teeming models for distributed community welling up in my widdle mind.
Why is Kottke a good weblogger? We’ve all read The Tipping Point by now. He makes messages ‘sticky’ (I wonder how many other people could have thrown five hundred people at plasticbag.org in a day) – ‘permalink nipples’ is as close to the most-clickable-link-ever as you could hope to get for an audience of webloggers. He is a true information-gathering maven, operating within a medium that radically enhances his ability to act as a meme-disseminating connector / salesman. And contextually, he was one of the first to undertake the blogging experiment before the explosion of numbers – making him the logical ‘founding-father’ of the new wave of webloggers. Like it or not, everything Jason says on the internet carries more weight than even your site.
Permalink nipples? Oh that’s great. Just great. “Click on my permalink nipples, baby…” – “Move your hand over my permalink nipples…” – or perhaps the most disturbing, “Move your mouse over my permalink nipples…”
An interesting piece of research from the BBC suggests that New Labour have fulfilled 80% of their campaign promises since they came into power. Now, I think we’ve all felt disillusioned with the Labour party at some point during the last few years, but surely 80% is a pretty astonishingly high figure. Particularly for a country that increasingly believes that politicians don’t do anything of value. Unfortunately, such good news is rather undercut by the two seats won by the BNP in Burnley.
Review: Too much fluff and not enough bum? I’ll show you….
People post crap, when you’re a blogger
All sites look crappy, when you’re A-list
Chicks’ sites are boring, they are all flowery
Streets stay outside – where I never go…
When you blog….
Advice that other people may find amusing, but which today is really sticking in my head: How to ask someone out on a date.
So for some reason, after a tiring but basically successful day, I became totally and utterly consumed by self-doubt and a desire to hack myself into ribbons mentally, and so I did it and then I felt awful and crap and like I was the most useless person in the world, so I used my tactic of making sure that you play music which redirects your mood from passive to active – which made me angry (which was good), and then for a little bit I felt like everyone else was shit, which was a novel shift in perspective, and then I came home and now I want to complain at someone, but I probably shouldn’t because they’ll think I’m being self-indulgent. Which I probably am. It always worries me when I can’t tell. Like it worries me when I don’t know if I’m talking too much. Or when I feel conversations spiralling out of hand and I don’t know how to steady them out again or withdraw gracefully. Other people have those horrible moments when you don’t know how to make your laughs sound genuine, even though they are. Right?
I don’t know why I should feel the need to go through all this palaver. I normally keep my occasional brain-farts extremely private and controlled – and I don’t know why I should feel like such a bloody inadequate thirty-year old. Where did all this stuff come from? Is it because I was stuck in a room with people all day, and because I find talking to large groups of people so unbelievably terrifying. What the fuck has happened to me after a year of privacy that makes the outside world so overwhelming at times? And when did everyone get so confident that they were right? And where’s the thing in the world that I can be best at that would justify my existence?
Nick: Do you think Harry Potter is a Ninja or a Pirate?
Tom: I think Harry Potter is definitely a Ninja
Tom: it’s the cloak of invisibility
Nick: Really?
Tom: but Ron Weasley is WAY pirate
Nick: I would have said the relentless good feeling made Harry a pirate.
Tom: I’m going to categorise EVERYONE into categories of ninja and pirate from now on
Tom: Kate – ninja
Tom: Mella – pirate
Tom: Toby – pirate
Tom: Nick – ninja
Tom: Fenner – ninja
Tom: Tom – ninja
Tom: Saddam Hussein – pirate
Tom: Margaret Thatcher – pirate
Tom: Bill Gates – pirate
Tom: Steve Jobs – ninja
Tom: Noah Wyle – pirate
Tom: Steven Spielberg – pirate
Nick: Can I post this list?
Tom: if you want!
Nick: Nahhh.
Tom: I didn’t think so
Nick: Half the names mean nothing…
Tom: pussy
Tom: – ninja
Tom: doggy – pirate
Nick: But you could post a list…
Nick: Doggy?
Nick: Oh, right.
Tom: doggies! SOOOO pirates.
Nick: That’s SO true.
Nick: My God.
Nick: Now that would start a discussion, all right.
Tom: Hahaha
Nick: And Ninjas are, of course, creatures of the night, subversive, rejecting the male authority…
Tom: exactly
Tom: much like…
Tom: Britney Spears
Tom: – ninja
Nick: Subtle rather than confrontational, weaker in a head-on confrontation…
Tom: actually no. she’s a pirate
Nick: What?
Tom: close run thing though
Nick: Thank you.
Tom: depeche mode are ninjas
Nick: Yes.
Nick: Harrison Ford?
Nick: Pirate.
Tom: pirate
Nick: George Clooney?
Tom: pirate
Nick: Pirate city….
The fifth sign of apocalypse is here. My cousin Susanna, known throughout her youth for swearing and changing her hair colour every twenty-two minutes and for sticking things through her ears over the bath and for generally listening to the Cure and growling at everyone – yes, that cousin Susanna – has just joined the committee of her local playgroup… There’s only one final sign left to come – the sleeping of the lion with the lamb, and the lamb pulling out a chainsaw and then eating the lion’s fleshy entrails. Then it’s judgment day. We’re all doomed.