Recently in Blogging Category

I try not to spend a bunch of time saying "hey, go read my other blogs," 'cause I kind of figure you would have if you wanted to. But I think every six weeks or so isn't too often to do a snapshot of the other posts I've written lately that I'm particularly fond of. Is it?

Also, I'm spending a lot of this weekend getting ready for BlogHer, so I'm not exactly focused on blogging. I mean, I am focused on blogging, since I'm preparing for a blogging conference. But it's a selfish focus, unlike pointing out my other posts so you pay more attention to me.

Wow, this is going well.

Anyway, I launched a new blog a few days ago: Bad Personal Ads. If you ever wandered through my old collection of bad ads (and bad responses to my ads, which were awesome), you know there are some doozies out there. I'm curating them for you, one a day. Aren't you glad?

In June at Crafting A Green World I put together a post full of recycled and handmade journals. There are so many gorgeous journals out there made of recycled paper, I have no clue why anyone would buy one made out of recently felled trees. I also made a list of places to donate craft supplies to charity, after spending what felt like hours going through outdated lists of organizations that craft for charity. In July, I wondered what to do with baby food jars and got tons of great ideas. Mary's comment wins, I love the garden pathway. Yesterday we announced the new Carnival of Green Crafts, which should be a lot of fun.

My favorite of my posts lately at JUST CAUSE was Are There Too Many Nonprofits? Admit, you can all think of one organization that exists for no reason.

At Heroine Content, we've reviewed the following since I last reported here:

• Hellboy: The Golden Army (me)
• Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (Grace)
• Wanted (Grace)
• Supercop (me)
• all four Indiana Jones movies (Grace)
• Ghost in the Shell(me)

We had a guest poster who goes by the handle "d" for a review of Speed Racer, though I did end up seeing it and largely agree with her assessment. I also wrote mini reviews of girl sports movies Bring It On, Ice Princess, and Stick It. I keep wanting to say "girly sports" but then I think of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I think that's about it. If you are aware of me blogging anywhere else, please notify me immediately so I can investigate.

I met Shannon at BlogHer last year. She's neat.

She wrote a post a couple of days ago called Nasty Tweets, Blog Cliques, and Q-list bloggers like me. Apparently, somebody said something about somebody copying someone and there was a thing. I'm kind of over interpersonal drama right now, so whatever. But then Shannon made some statements about blogs and cliques that I found interesting. I'll let you read her post for the details, but here is the gist:

1. There are cliques of successful bloggers who don't want to socialize with new bloggers.
2. People who are new to blogging see these cliques being exclusive and they lose trust in the wonderful place that is the blogosphere.
3. People deny that blog cliques exist, and that needs to stop.

So here are my thoughts, in order:

1. Well, yeah. However, there is a limit on the number of blogs one can read and the number of friends one can keep up with.
2. Did they really believe people would stop acting like people because they're blogging?
3. Who's denying it? I've never talked with anyone who denies it.

This is something I thought about a lot after BlogHer two years ago.

Afterwards I read commentary harshing on "the mommybloggers" for being a clique, for being unapproachable, because they were hanging out with each other. I don't actually know which ones they meant because there were more than 700 attendees. Surely a clique can't be larger than 20 people, so if we assume even 10 cliques of mommybloggers that year, that's 200 people... leaving 500 other people who aren't in the cliques. So I had a hard time figuring out how mommyblogger cliques ruined BlogHer because there was no one left to talk to.

I am not a clique denier. Seriously. Human beings make cliques, it's one of our bad habits. So this post is a little bit of a devil's advocate thing, but I'm also curious about where we draw lines. How much do we fall prey to the myth of blogosphere as equal opportunity playing field and then resent anyone who is already full up on friends, acquaintances, and blogs to read, so they don't pay attention to us. If you're popular and 700 people are reading your blog, but you only have time to read 100 blogs, does that make you snobbish? What if you really like those 100 blogs, are you supposed to stop reading them so you can start reading some new people?

At an event, how do you tell the difference between a clique and a group of friends who rarely have a chance to see each other and who are doing their damn best to pack as much face time into three days as they can before they have to fly home?

It may be a "you know it when you see it" thing, but how much of that perception is colored by the viewer's own past experiences and personal issues? The accusation of clique-dom is hard to refute if the person making the accusation never tried to talk to the alleged clique members because they seemed like a clique. "Everyone seemed to know everyone else, I felt left out" at a conference of 700-800 people strains my credulity. At what point do we make people responsible for their own feelings and expect that if they attend an event full of strangers and they want to interact, they will take it upon themselves to start conversations?

Then again, my feeling that there are plenty of random people to talk to at BlogHer conferences may be like my feeling that pervasive advertising isn't really a problem. Perhaps I just see what I want to and ignore the annoyances, like cliques and billboards. How many people have to say "everyone seemed to know everyone else already" before it's a comment on the culture and not the individual?

Online, people feel ignored if their comments aren't responded to, if their posts aren't linked to, if they blog in response to someone else's post and the blogger they reference doesn't come over and check it out. But if you're a popular blogger, how do you have time to follow everyone who follows you?

Yes, this is what I think about when I should be scrubbing my shower curtain clean on the driveway. Yes, thanks, I already know about running it through the washer but it didn't work.

As a follow-up to my post yesterday, these two things don't stem from a misunderstanding of what blogs are, but they are deeply confused.

(Disclosure: I currently work for a blog advertising network.)

Ads on blogs are good, because writers should get compensated for their work.

A guy came to my door the other day trying to pay me to put an advertising sign in my yard since we live on a corner. I'm not kidding. He was not offering to compensate me for the work I do in maintaining my yard. Bloggers are writers, they just happen to write in a particular format. However, they are not getting compensated for their writing, unless they are doing a problogging gig where they are paid by someone else.

Writers who work for newspapers get compensated for their writing. Writers who sell to magazines get paid for their writing when they sell an article. Writers who make money from ads on their blogs are renting space on their websites for a corporation to use to sell a product.

Again, I'm not saying it's bad. I'm going to try it out myself and see what happens. But the corporations buying that space don't really give a damn what you're writing as long as they get your readers' eyeballs and you don't make them look bad. The sales guy probably wouldn't have wanted to advertise in my yard if it was a wreck, but only because it would have reflected poorly on his company.

They are paying for access to your readers in a positive setting, not for your writing itself. Individuals who work in those corporations may respect and enjoy your writing, but the checks come from the entity who wants traffic.

I wish there were more opportunities for non-mommybloggers.

The mommybloggers get a ton of attention, which is why it's easy to feel like they're the dominant kind of blogger if you run in more personal blog circles than business or technology blog circles. Mommybloggers get trips and free stuff and they get interviewed on television.

Let's get this straight, though. What mommybloggers are getting is not granted by a charitable foundation established to provide awards for excellence in blogging. The freebies are given by corporations who think they will make more money if they give stuff to mommybloggers to either influence what they blog about or influence people they know. If the corporations thought they could give all of that stuff away and nothing about their bottom line would change, they wouldn't do it. The giving of stuff must result in changes in purchasing behavior, or the stuff will no longer be given.

If you want in on that action, you have to make companies think you will increase their revenue if they woo you. Whining about how you blog too and why do they get all the free stuff and it's isn't FAAAAIIIIRRRR is beside the point.

This is not a meritocracy. This is commerce. I'm not saying it's bad, or that successful mommybloggers are doing anything wrong. Just be clear about what makes it possible. For the mommybloggers who are doing the corporate thang, mommyblogging is a business.

Like my post about Movable Type, this is mostly an exercise in getting some thoughts out of my system so I can move on. If you're not interested in blogs, you may want to move along.

For those of us who are still here, let's do an exercise. Look at the following websites:

• io9
• Red Stapler
• African American Dad
• The Hathor Legacy
• The Hardware Aisle
• Bevo Beat
• 5ives

What do they have in common? (I'll give you a minute.) OK, time's up.

The answer is: they are all blogs.

I count one high-traffic group blog that's part of a commercial network, two personal blogs, one cultural critique group blog, one blog that's an extension of a magazine, one that's part of a newspaper, and one that's a personal art project of sorts.

The only way you can say they're not all blogs is if you define blogs the way my husband defines pie. In his universe, only the kind of pie he likes is pie. Pie must have pieces of fruit in it, or it's not pie, with the exception of pumpkin and pecan - because, you know, he likes them, so they are pie. So several kinds of pie I like, which aside from pumpkin includes lemon meringue and coconut cream, is not actually pie. Even though everyone else in the world thinks it's pie, to him it's not pie because he doesn't like it.

If you are going to claim any of these websites are not blogs, you are probably making a similar argument.

These days, blogs are created by everyone from Alice next door to the marketing department of Monkeypants International Ltd. to the local chapter of the Wombat Liberation Front. If we see that our local newspaper has started a blog, we say "oh, they have a blog now." If we learn that our next door neighbor has a blog, we say "how lovely, I better not read it in case I find out she heard us arguing last week." If we learn that a company based in a nearby town has a blog now, we say "oh gosh, I'd better get over there and leave them a nasty comment about my recent customer service experience."

We really don't spend a lot of time saying "that's not a blog" when confronted with a blog. People basically know a blog when they see one. However, despite their ability to recognize a blog, many people seem confused about what blogs are and how they work. Deeply confused. Since this is the internet, I will now proceed to tell you why they are wrong.

You may or may not have run across the following new word:

Kawasakied

Definition: To have your blog linked to or acknowledged by someone famous like Guy Kawasaki who totally kicks ass, but if you told your mom about it she'd be like "Huh? What's a blog? Hey, is that the guy who invented the motorcycle?"

It's not quite a Kawasaki-ing, but Heroine Content somehow got added to Alltop. My mom will totally have no idea what that is.

I think this about sums up my reaction:

Increasingly unwilling to hang out with busted template + unwilling to make a commitment to a new design until the MT 4.2 templates come out and I upgrade yet again = hanging out with a Vox/Typepad style for a while.

Feels kinda funny having almost nothing in the sidebar. Wonder how that happened.

In case you missed it, in May I wrote some other stuff.

My favorite bits from Crafting A Green World:

• How Safe and Green Are Your Crafting Supplies? Part 1 and Part 2, wherein I evaluated a craft supply called fusible web and concluded that while it probably won't give me brain damage, we shouldn't be using it.
• Gorgeous Denim Quilts, wherein I compiled a list of interesting and non-country quilts made out of reused blue jeans.
• Alternatives to Batting for the Green Quilter, wherein my good friend S. helped me give the peeps some advice on ways to make the insides of your quilt as environmentally pretty as possible.

I also started writing at JUST CAUSE in April, focused on the nonprofit sector. My best post so far is Saving the World Without Phones or Lights?. You can find them all on my author page.

All Access Blogging has come back from a snooze. I'm consolidating all the tips into a master list called How To Make Your Blog Accessible. I'd love to get feedback from anyone, especially if you use LiveJournal, since that's the one I have the most trouble with. I'm using the main page of All Access Blogging to alert folks to new tips being added, and I'll probably throw in a few other things as well from time to time.

On Heroine Content, Grace and I put together the 21st Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans, and then we were otherwise detained. One of our frequent commenters helped us out with a guest review of Speed Racer which helped me not dread seeing it for C-Man's birthday, and I have to say I mostly agreed with her take on the film.

And that was May. Bye bye, May!

Note to my readers who don't care about my feelings about software: Sorry! Please go on about your business. I will try to write something more interesting for you in the next few days.

I am not the target market for most products. I get this. The woman who ended up sobbing in the parking lot of IKEA on her first and only trip there because all she could think about when she saw all that merchandise was landfills and child labor and toxic plastic? Not going to buy your widget. So when companies don't expend any effort to reach out to me, I understand why. Go where the money is, people.

When I do fall for a product, though, I fall HARD. As you are no doubt aware if you've been reading this blog for any length of time at all, I fell hard for Movable Type (MT) the minute I logged in after Six Apart (6A), the company who makes it, installed it on my newly rented server space. Now, almost six years later, I love MT like I love America, which is to say that I think it's one of the better ideas out there and works very well, but I am FED UP with many of the decisions being made by the people who have power over it.

After much reflection, I have realized that 6A does not want me to use MT - or at least, they don't care if I do or not.

Ouch.

I haven't ever had a product I love decide not to love me back.

(I will admit up front that I have not been part of the solution. I do not test betas and offer feedback. I don't help out in the forums. C-Man and I spent a couple of hours troubleshooting a bug in the upgrade process in June of 2005 and let them know about it, so they could fix it in MT 3.17, but that was a while ago and I think our karma from that has long since expired. So I'm a lazy, selfish whiner, and you can take that into account as you read this.)

Here is what I have realized about MT's target market, and why it is not me:

• Movable Type is for people who either don't care what their blog looks like, can hand code beautiful CSS, or can afford to hire a designer.
• Movable Type is for people who don't care very much about accessibility, web standards, or future-proofing their blogs.

However, I still love Movable Type and recommend it, for reasons I describe at the end of this very, very long post.

I do apologize. I've been a bit distractified.

You see, I'm writing elsewhere too. Yes, I know, you are the most important readers. However, unless you're going to start sending me checks, I feel I must see other people as well. After six months of all-baby-all-the-time, it's time for some Real Work around here.

(All of you who have children are now laughing, yes?)

In case you are behind on what I've been up to, I am blogging about environmental issues in crafting at Crafting A Green World, part of the Green Options network which is totally for great justice. They have a food blog and a fashion and style blog as well, and then a good number of other blogs that are much more serious and also quite good.

Hey look, a commercial on my blog!

Seriously, though, y'all know I'm all about shaming you for using plastic bags saving the world, and I feel good about working with these folks. So stop by and check us out. Or if you just want to see what I've been doing, visit my own personal corner of the GO empire.

Though I am somewhat like Alanis Morissette in that my understanding of what makes something ironic can be faulty, I do find it amusing that I just tried to comment on an LJ written by a person who is blind, and I got hit with a visual CAPTCHA, and I failed it.