shit! I missed it

I totally missed my blogiversary.

Two days ago, this here blog turned FOUR. Four whole years I’ve been writing in this here space.

Holy crap, guys. Four years.

kindred spirit

Via Mommy, PhD., I introduce the newest academic mom blogger: AcadeMama.

And no, there’s no relation.

it’s that time of year again

when half of my blogroll bloggers are making reports from the BlogHer conference in (San Jose?) California.
Geeky Mom
Dooce
Suburban Bliss
Fussy

I read through the BlogHer reports each year with a combination of envy/longing and indignation. And while my indignation, to be sure, is borne completely out of the envy, I still give it a little consideration as a valid reaction.

The exclusionary nature of the gathering peeves me. One must have certain resources (green paper resources, mostly) to be able to participate–especially when one lives in the east and the conference is always on the west coast.

Of course, if I could convince my family that this conference was a necessary trip for me to take for my research, I would be able to scrape up the money and babysitters necessary for me to be gone for a long weekend in the summer (read: rack up the credit cards and desposit the children with my mom). But because my research–the stuff that is fast evolving into a disseration project–is about blogging, somehow I find very few people (outside of my scholarly peops) who take what I’m doing seriously. However, when on the surface (from many reports), the conference simply looks like one big trip to CA for Starbucks, sushi, and lipstick, this makes it hard to convince anyone (myself included) that I should indeed be participating in the gathering.

There is something important, to be sure, in the BlogHer phenomenon: that even with the networks and communities that emerge in such online spaces, we still seek out (and envy) “real” interaction? A similar physical congregation of running bloggers in Chicago has recently emerged as well; while it is not of the proportions of BlogHer, it is similar: once a month a group of running bloggers meet for dinner to somehow “solidify” their online connections.

It makes those of us who participate in online communities because of the ease of access and lack of logistic constraints (we can participate regardless of where we are, or what time of the day it is, or whether our kids are with us or not, etc) somehow second-rate, that once the communities move past simply the blogging networks and into something “real,” those of us stuck in our houses are less-than.

Well. I didn’t mean for this post to turn into a whine fest. And really, if I had the $$ to go to BlogHer, I’d be there–but NOT without a second thought about the long tail (of which I am a part) of bloggers who must read about the sessions from afar, and how Andrew O’Baoill is right: the technology of social software does not afford users that ideal public sphere where stratifications are flattened.

blograce

What do you do when you accidentally blacklist one of your favorite people?

First, you admit it to her that you’re the one who accidentally checked her off as spam.

And then you quickly remove her from the list.

And then you post about it before she does, so you’re (possibly) further redeemed in her eyes.

Please don’t tell BP!!

I let it happen again

I let the white space creep up again.

Sorry. I am on a mini-hiatus right now. I’ll post when I can, but things are just too busy for me–all free moments are used prepping, grading, or reading for exams.

Be back full-on in a few months.

still at it

Matt Kirschenbaum explains Why I Blog Under My Own Name (and a Modest Proposal) (via).

The overall message: blogging can have great benefits if done properly.

My fingers itched to put scare quotes around the word properly. But really, I’m not being disrespectful.

Here’s what I’m chewing on. Properly, I think for MGK, means professionally. It means talking about your research, research that is in various stages of progress. Other stuff: politics, current events, and “midnight anxieties”–off limits.

And I respect this. I have enormous respect for this, esp in light of his blog living on his public U’s server.

(Pick your comparative transition), this to me feels patriarchal. Or masculinist. Forgive me while I spew out some terms I’m literally wrestling with. All of those things that have been traditionally marked (indicted) as feminine: the emotion, the daily living, the embodiment of the writer and hir experience is rendered useless. None if it has a place in/on the medium, or genre.

The line between public and private is a gendered one? I don’t think I’m that far afield. In fact, that’s somewhere in what I’m reading for exams. Somewhere.

insight in strange places

OK, a quick confession: I’m reading a book,Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld.

Just a small defense: only reading it in bed at night, when I would be worthless to read anything for exams.

So, I’m reading this book, which I picked up at our library because I liked the cover and because Wally Lamb wrote a glowing blurb for the back cover, and it catalogues a midwestern girl’s 4 years through an elite prep school in New England. It has been OK. I’m still reading, anyway. I’m not getting as much gritty social commentary as I am kind of liking the characters and etc.

But the real reason I’m blogging this book is the nearly obvious insight it offered me (why hadn’t I really thought of this before, smack-yourself-on-the-forehead kind of duh) in this scene:

The protagonist sits in English class, and the popular rich girls pass her a rubric for her to rate the teacher’s dress, makeup, and shoes.

I let the piece of paper sit untouched on my lap, like a napkin. But the truth was, I felt cornered by it. Yes there were things I didn’t like about Ms. Moray, but they had little to do with her clothes. And besides, didn’t Aspeth and Dede understand that written words trapped you? A piece of paper could slip from a notebook, flutter out a window, be lifted from the trash and uncrumpled, whereas an incriminating remark made in conversation was weightless and invisible, deniable in a later moment. (147)

I think Lee (protagonist) feels trapped in other ways; for instance, she feels required to contribute to the rubric in order to be accepted. But this is a theme of the book: the tension between shaping one’s identity to fit in and preserving oneself at the cost of being in with the community. For Lee to NOT write in the rubric would have been just as damning as if she were to write in it and were to get caught.

It’s this kind of choice, the choice between the person and the people, that writers make. Delicately. Writers write because it’s in them to do so. But so much of what is in us is hurtfully honest, or jarring, or scary, or something that people might not want to look at. A thin line. A kind of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t.

Gah. I could go on, I suppose, about the implications between the spoken and written word (just from this quote). Like, the spoken word is “deniable,” and somehow more prone to things like deceit, while the written word, though “incriminating,” is unflinching, concrete, static, and therefore closer to truth. A reach, I know.

Right. Whatever, I’ll stop my Lit 101 essay now. But the cool thing, then, is that blogs are both written and not-written. It can exist and then disappear. It can grow and change. ?

Here’s where, while writing that Lit 101 essay, I’d get up and get some Doritos, ’cause now I’m not sure what I’m saying anymore.

making some sense

iBeth points to an interview with Heather Armstrong, where she advises would-be bloggers to suppose that the one person you wouldn’t want reading your blog, reads it. And that this should provide some sort of beacon concerning what you should write and what you shouldn’t.

Add this to the stuff swirling around Ivan Tribble at the Chronicle of Higher Ed telling academes to RUN! RUN away from the blog! if they ever want to get hired, and I’m listening.

Not because I care, particularly, whether Ivan will be on the hiring committee that doesn’t hire me because I have a blog.

What strikes me, or why I care, is that this advice from both Ivan and Heather is pretty standard by now. I mean, we’ve been hearing about people getting fired about what they’ve said on their blogs for a year or more. Yet people keep publishing stuff that will make, obviously, someone angry.

Why?

Why do many (not all, of course) bloggers insist on talking about the people that surround them? iBeth’s greenhouse saga is the perfect example. She is working in real life to communicate with people, f2f, and is not really getting anywhere. The written, publicked communication, however, creates action, re-action.

There’s somewhere in here an argument about people who have lost jobs *wanted* to lose them, but that’s not really where I’m going with this, because I don’t believe that. What I do believe, though, is that it is easy to slam a door in someone’s face without anyone to witness it, and harder to slam a door in someone’s face when the neighbors are looking on. And it’s easier to fire someone than it is to deal with what that someone has to say about drunk people at office parties, etc.

My hope for the blog and similar social software is that it will pave the way for a communication revolution, one in which people must be held accountable for their sometimes unseen actions and their sometimes unheard words. Instead of “What would Jesus do?” people would ask themselves “What would a blogger report if I say/do this?”

don’t eat over your notes (or, blogs are not a weapon)

Your notes will be a sticky mess of strawberry syrup from the desert.

Last night I had an opportunity to attend a networking banquet for a regional chapter of a national professional association. The banquet’s speaker was a local business woman who is a jane-of-many trades: publishing on demand, web developer, women’s marketing consultant. She also runs workshops for businesses who would like to implement blogs to ramp up profits and visibility. Her presentation was a kind of primer for “how blogs can help your business.”

comments fixed!

A week or so ago, I was getting crazy bombarded with Trackback spam, and when I would de-spam with Blacklist, I would get an error message that I didn’t understand, and so I assumed the de-spam wasn’t taking. So I went into IP banning and pasted the IP address from which the spam came.

The spam stopped.

Nothing I tried to fix the comments was working, so I went in and deleted the banned IP address. Now comments work again.

Comment away!