A “weblog is a website where a person writes regularly about recent events or topics that interest them, usually with photos and links to other websites that they find interesting.” So says Oxforddictionaries.com, helpfully describing the origins of the word as dating back to the 1990s “from web in the sense ‘World Wide Web’ + log in the sense ‘regular record of incidents.’” In recent years, Oxford also points out, weblog is almost always abbreviated simply to blog.
Wikipedia will tell you that as of Feb. 20, 2014, there were around 172 million Tumblr and 75.8 million WordPress blogs in existence worldwide. Origins are always a bit of a murky business, but Justin Hall, who began posting online in 1994, while working as a student intern at San Francisco-based Wired magazine in the summer of his sophomore year at Swarthmore College, just outside Philadelphia, was among the pioneers of online diarists and web loggers who started personal blogging.
In a Jan. 28 note to his readers, Andrew Sullivan announced he was shuttering his blog after almost 15 years. Originally known as The Daily Dish (later called simply the Dish), it had been online since the summer of 2000. “Biased and Balanced” became the blog’s motto in January 2012.
Sullivan wrote the blog alone for the first six years, “for no pay, apart from two pledge drives. In 2006 he took the blog to time.com and then to theatlantic.com, where he was able to employ interns for the first time to handle the ever-expanding web of content,” the Dish reported at http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/about/
In explaining his decision to end the Dish, Sullivan wrote:
“Why [end the Dish]? Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.
“The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.”
His last blog post, “The Years Of Writing Dangerously,” written by Sullivan, was posted Feb. 6 “@ 3:00pm.”
In that post, Sullivan points readers back to a Sept. 3, 2002 post of his, “Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?” published in Slate’s “Webhead. Inside the Internet” section. Wrote Sullivan more than a dozen years ago: “[T]he speed with which an idea in your head reaches thousands of other people’s eyes has another deflating effect, this time in reverse: It ensures that you will occasionally blurt out things that are offensive, dumb, brilliant, or in tune with the way people actually think and speak in private. That means bloggers put themselves out there in far more ballsy fashion than many officially sanctioned pundits do, and they make fools of themselves more often, too. The only way to correct your mistakes or foolishness is in public, on the blog, in front of your readers. You are far more naked than when clothed in the protective garments of a media entity.
“But, somehow, you’re liberated as well as nude: blogging as a media form of streaking. I notice this when I write my blog, as opposed to when I write for the old media. I take less time, worry less about polish, and care less about the consequences on my blog. That makes for more honest writing. It may not be ‘serious’ in the way, say, a 12-page review of 14th-century Bulgarian poetry in the New Republic is serious. But it’s serious inasmuch as it conveys real ideas and feelings in as unvarnished and honest a form as possible. I think journalism could do with more of that kind of seriousness. It’s democratic in the best sense of the word. It helps expose the wizard behind the media curtain.”
Closing down a blog has always been part of the life cycle of the web. “I’ve seen this happen a thousand times,” said Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog, which was published in July 2002. Blood has been blogging since April 1999 and can be found at http://www.rebeccablood.com
“It’s usually people have a baby, or get married, or get a new job – interests changed, and they stop posting.” Blood wrote those words more than a decade ago. She still blogs herself at Rebecca’s Pocket, and her most recent posting on Feb. 28 was on season three of BBC One’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes, and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson. Rupert Graves plays Detective Inspector (D.I.) Greg Lestrade.
Mind you, Sullivan was not much of a fan of Blood’s book, The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. In his Sept. 3, 2002 post “Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?” published in Slate, Sullivan refers to Blood’s book published earlier that summer in July: “It’s almost silly to write a dead-tree book about blogs anyway, don’t you think? The critical language of blogging—the hypertext links to other Web pages, for example – cannot even be translated into book form, and you end up with lame appendixes and footnotes crammed with web addresses. There were a few amusing essays in We’ve Got Blog – Julian Dibbell’s ‘Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man,’ and Tim Cavanaugh’s ‘Let Slip the Blogs of War,’ for example – but both these tomes struck me as products of old media thinking: ‘Hey, there are all these blogs out there. Let’s Do a Book.’ How about ‘Let’s Not Do a Book?’”
Bloomberg View columnist Megan McArdle, whose Asymmetrical Information blog appeared in Newsweek and the Daily Beast, and who has also written for the Atlantic and the Economist magazines, wrote in a Feb. 5 Bloomberg View story – the day before Sullivan’s departure from blogging – “Journalism is a lecture; blogging is a conversation … My industry faces two big challenges. The first is to find a business model that will pay for journalism — which is not being killed off by bloggers, but by giant web companies that sell lots of ads without doing any of that expensive reporting. Andrew was the pioneer of one possible model – subscriptions – and I think his experience has shown that this model won’t work. The Dish got an amazing amount of support from loyal readers, far more than anyone else could hope for, and it pulled in enough money to cover the cost of operations, but only if those operations operated at an unsustainably high pitch.
“The other challenge is ‘what will journalism careers look like?’ My profession, after grousing about ‘pajama-clad bloggers’ who were allowed to say anything they wanted without editorial interference, has moved toward that model. As ad dollars have died, we have come to rely more and more on armies of people putting out quick content.”
As for me, I write pretty much what I want when I want. Which is about what I did as a print journalist for the most part, some of my critics would no doubt remind me. “Write what you know” remains good advice to writers, I think, although I’d go a bit further and add write what you’re truly interested in and write about things you may want to know more about. Then let the chips fall where they may. As I wrote in a blog post last Sept. 11, “In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time ‘kill’ a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone. Freedom of the press is the last thing they want when it comes to staff.” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/)
That latter notion of writing about things that interest you but you may want to know more about is particularly apropos for bloggers where your readers are often more than happy to comment and in some cases are almost guaranteed to have more expertise and background in a particular area than you do, which they may blog about themselves, and are usually happy to share with you and your readers.
Why online commenting on news stories seems so often to bring out the worst in some people is still something of a puzzle that researchers continue to study with some wondering if it is the anonymity afforded them by many commenting modules that don’t require real names, but only pseudonyms as usernames, that causes problems.
Still, it rarely has been a problem for me blogging, with the odd notable exception. While it seems likely much of what is said in online commenting on news stories would never be said face-to-face, person-to-person, it has been only a minor – and even then, exceptional – annoyance for me. But if you are interested in a broader discussion on some of these issues, you might check out these links: “Robert Fisk: Anonymous comments and why it’s time we all stop drinking this digital poison” at http://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/robert-fisk-anonymous-comments-and-why-its-time-we-all-stop-drinking-this-digital-poison-3349527.html, or Margaret Sullivan: Seeking a return to civility in online comments at http://fores.blogs.uv.es/2010/06/22/01-seeking-a-return-to-civility-in-online-comments/, or Katie Roiphe’s Slate magazine article, “What’s wrong with angry commenters?” at http://www.slate.com/articles/life/roiphe/2011/12/what_s_wrong_with_angry_commenters_.html
As a generalist, who writes on an eclectic (perhaps even at times eccentric) range of topics and ideas, I find readers who are more than happy to comment and share their expertise and background in a particular area very helpful. And even if they can’t help sometimes, other bloggers and commenters will often offer encouragement.
A couple of days after I posted a piece in part on the Sir Leonard Tilley Building (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/canadas-other-national-spy-agency-the-communications-security-establishment-used-its-internet-cable-tap-program-atomic-banjo-for-http-metadata-monitoring-and-collection-from-free-file-upl/), the old Communications Security Establishment (CSE) five-storey headquarters at 719 Heron Rd., near Carleton University, and well known to the intelligence community as “The Farm,” located at the corner of Riverside Drive and Heron Road, within the boundaries of the federal government’s Confederation Heights campus, in Ottawa, I serendipitously came across Bill Robinson’s Lux Ex Umbra blog, which bills (pun intended) itself as “monitoring Canadian signals intelligence (SIGINT) activities past and present.”
The Sir Leonard Tilley Building was built in 1961 and custom designed for use by intelligence services. The building’s exterior elevations conceal specialized features linked to intelligence gathering such as the design of “slippers” beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems. The Communications Security Establishment’s $1.2 billion new headquarters at 1929 Ogilvie Rd., completed last July, dubbed “Camelot” in official Department of National Defence documents, is the most expensive federal building ever constructed in Canada, and located next door to the only slightly better known Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which also has its headquarters in Gloucester in east-end Ottawa.
Bill, as it turned out, had written in some detail on the Sir Leonard Tilley Building about three years ago on April 7, 2012 (http://luxexumbra.blogspot.ca/2012/04/cse-facilities-sir-leonard-tilley.html), so I sent him an e-mail query Jan. 30 asking if subsequent to writing his post he “had any success discovering more about the ‘slippers’ beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems in the Sir Leonard Tilley Building in Ottawa?”
Bill replied Feb. 1: “Sadly, I haven’t learned anything more about the Tilley building’s systems. I wonder if we’ll learn more about the building after CSE finishes vacating the premises (assuming they haven’t already).”
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