But who cares? I spent part of this afternoon clicking and reading through the reports about how many weblogs there are now, worldwide and in the Netherlands, how many links they receive, how large their impact is on the MSM (to use the old blogosphere code for mainstream media). Yes, also I downloaded the pdf with the powerpoint-presentation of Paul Molenaar for Blogonomics 6, — via http://www.denieuwereporter.nl/?p=405 which contains the information that there are now about 600.000 bloggers in the Netherlands — of which 260.000 use web-log.nl, the horrible (imho) blogsoftware of Ilse (is it? I’m too lazy to even check). The powerpoint presentation is full of Fokke and Sukke cartoons.

Why am I so bored by this? Because it’s in the end only about numbers. Numbers which are important for old-world investers and advertisers.

3 loose, maybe stupid remarks, between brackets:
(1. Is that why the 260.000 of web-log.nl are mentioned?). (2. Probably anybody in the Netherlands doing a lot of surfing has stumbled many times on web-log.nl-blogs that turn out to not exist, the link exists, the blog doesn’t). (3. During Blogonomicsweb-log.nl is about blond models in tight T-shirts, as can be seen here: http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2006/04/exhausting_afte.html).

Another reason for my boredom is that in such reports and business-confernces like Blogonomics, (still) the old mass-media and journalism function as the main contexts. (Why count how many links blogs make to the old mass-media?) Of course there is still a big role for the ‘major players’ (like Guardian, BBC etc.). But you do not establish insight into that role by counting how often blogs refer to those major players. Oh well, or maybe it does.

(It sure isn’t accidental that after a week with lots of blogging about MySpace — at least I saw a few postings about MySpace, all refering to the same issues — both De Volkskrant and NRC have articles about MySpace. That’s not strange, that’s how journalism works).

The research of how stories travel through a network of interlinked sites — like the research done by Anjo Anjewierden http://anjo.blogs.com/metis/, is lots more interesting (again, immnsho).

Also much more interesting is Geert Lovink’s proposal (I know, I’m late to link…): http://www.networkcultures.org/geert/2006/03/24/blogging-the-nihilist-impulse/. He writes: “Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog adds to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. What’s declining is the Belief in the Message.” I might be less nihilisticly-inclined than Geert. I’d like to stress the ‘constructing of a ‘new’ culture’ (which is not utopian, but a big mess….) instead of focussing on how that dismantles the old — but that might, in the end, be mostly a difference in rhetoric and style…

Trying to get into the top 100 of Technorati is subscribing to the logic of mass media. (And indeed, it’s missing the point about publishing online).

I’m beginning to ramble. Can’t make it cohere. (As Ez sez). It’s not really my field. I learned much more today from reading bits of the bookhistorian Roger Chartier. Amazon links to: Order of Books and Forms and Meaning. Discovered that by hitting ‘surprise me’ you can get many more pages to read ‘inside’.

First spent time revisiting blog-theory anno 2002 (like Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook: http://www.rebeccablood.net/handbook/). I made some notes on yellow post-its.

Then went through folders on my harddisk in which I have stored webpages and pdfs ‘to read’; re-ordered the contents (I now have 4 different research folders), deleted some, printed the papers I really want/have to read this week.

After that I made an old-fashioned links-page, and visited (quickly) about 100 (?), 200 (?) blogs to see if I want to include them on this page (for further reference, to remember). I worked through VoodooPad-documents in which I had saved links, went though the linkslist of my ‘old’ blog, followed links on blogs that I was happy to revisit or rediscover, and, most importantly, used my own memory. I still have to go through the bookmark-files of both Firefox and Safari — I only bookmarks when I’m too lazy to do more than hit ‘command-D’ (so the bookmark-lists tends to be long and totally unorganized).

Will this compulsion to order lead anywhere?

I never really go to use delicious/ariealt. Although I do use the delicious-accounts of others, often to good result. What one uses or not, has a lot to do with, well, preferences. (What you like, what you’re good at, what fits your use if time and working methodology, how important design is, how important good writing, etc.).

I also don’t use RSS. (My blog does RSS though, and I know some people appreciate that). I used RSS for a while when I spent much time on trains. Before catching a train I would boot my RSS-reader, let the feeds stream onto my harddisk, to browse through on the train. RSS was / is a way to have online content when there’s no connection. (I hated blogs that only put a headline plus a lead in the RSS, or worse, only a headline). What I miss in RSS is the personality of the design, the typography, all that (subtle? — hopefully) visual stuff that adds to the ‘voice’ of the site.

Wrt design: there is a strange attraction to making all texts look the same: have it shown in the stylesheet / template of your choice. (But basically RSS-readers and services like Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) do not really look attractive).

I am put-off by really bad design. (That’s what I learned from visiting 100 blogs tonight, and quickly closing those which looked really ugly). But I’m not put off by generic Blogger/Wordpress/MoveableType-templates, as long as they are (a bit) clear.

Links-page and notes to come…

Here’s some of what I printed to read:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/.

3 hours in a train (Maastricht – Amsterdam + delay) gave me the opportunity to — finally — work through the passages in Flusser’s writing that I had indicated by sticking a small yellow post-it on pages. So that’s why there are so many Flusser-posts all of a sudden.

I wonder if i should go about this in another way — like putting the quotations in ‘pages’ instead of making them part of the blog. (And keeping the blog really as a more or less daily record of what I’m up to…)

Probably the right answer to this, from the perspective of ‘how-to-make-a-well-edited-blog’, is “yes, if you dump so much stuff at once, use ‘write page’, not ‘write post’.” (Although, technically speaking there’s no difference between pages and posts).

I’m enjoying it: tinkering & tweaking the .css-files of the wordpress-themes. Really. But what I do not get is why I should lose all of the whitespace in the lefthand margin of the content-part when I delete the one line that tells items in the righthand sidebar to get a 1px underlining when they happen to be a link… Makes no sense at all. I might not be a css-wizard, but I’m not stupid either. I can even look up and find out if it’s not something in the php. Makes me wonder: what does this blog look like on a windows-machine… Makes me wonder as well: why do people make such a mess of the css-files? It’s chock-full of lines that are not used… Maybe it’s the theme I’m using? Might be. Tomorrow I’ll tinker with another theme. Because it is fun.

Consider blogging as an ‘egotechniek’ (ego-technique, technology of the ego/self).

I do not feel ‘at home’ writing english. I miss that I cannot be subtle when I’d like to be subtle. Writing english for me means that I have to make an even greater effort at begin clear. Constructing clear sentences, constructing simple sentences.

I do not mind writing ‘international english’. I am not ashamed that my english isn’t perfect, or is clearly the english of a Dutchman. The english I use is the english as lingua franca. A communication language. (And just as I can more easily understand the french spoken or written by Africans than the french of Le Monde, so I image my english is easier to understand by non-native english speakers).

I do use english because it will make the stuff I write available to people in my environment. Not all of them read dutch.

I do use english because I will report on my research in english, because it’s the lingua franca of the research community, and not all the people who might (or are) interested in my research do read dutch.

I do admit that I’d rather stick to dutch. I write more easily in dutch. I have the feeling I can be more subtle. I do know better when a sentence is clear and when a sentence is unclear or unnecessarily complex. I can also more easily just ‘type on’ — something I enjoy doing — let the thoughts go from my brain straight into the fingertips so to say. I can also construct complex sentences when that might be necessary, or better.

But then: I also love to mix languages. One thing I do not understand about contemporary literature is why the condition of using multiple languages (meertaligheid) isn’t represented much better in literature. Quite a large part of the population is using multiple languages all the time. Be it because they are amongst people from different countries most of the time (me, on the Jan van Eyck, me with an Irish girlfriend), or because they are born in between two languages (say Dutch and Berber), or prefer speaking a dialect. (Anyway, it would of course limit the possible readership of a book…)

I will use both english and dutch here. I’m using WordPress, so why not use the possibilities. I will tag every post either as ‘en’ — for english — or ‘nl’ — for a post in dutch. I will also tag some posts as ‘de’, for german, and who knows I’ll get to use ‘fr’ for french, or even ‘it’ for italian… Though those categories will only pertain to quotations.

I know I have readers who do not read english. I do know that I also have readers who prefer that I use dutch. Hence I will write in dutch too.

Generally I will use english for all posts concerning my research, for subjects indirectly connected to the research, and for stuff which concern english-written sources anyway.

I will use dutch for more personal stuff, posts on cycling, and for subjects related to the Netherlands and Belgium.

Let’s see how it’ll work out.

Fiddling around with WordPress, WordPress themes & all that. Haven’t yet published the url of the new blog. Has to be filled first.

I like to keep control — installing new themes is pretty easy, but I want, no, what I need to know is what the structure is. What’s in the css-files, what’s in the php, what the different files do, et cetera. I might not be able to write one line of php, but the least I can do is read through the php-files and understand what’s done where. I might not be very good at stylesheets, but I can copy and change. And that is what I will do.