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CAUGHT IN PRINT!!!
Okay you caught me. I was crossing the streams. Mixing the metaphors. I
wrote about blogs. In a print publication. And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those pesky bloggers.
I have to admit when I was writing it, I was wondering when everyone
would catch on. Or if anyone would. I havent been able to ferret out
any CBG circa figures, but its no threat to US or TV
GUIDE. Could a meme from the print world infiltrate the comics
blogosphere, I wondered?
The answer: COULD IT EVER!
In case you managed to miss it, here's the offending paragraph:
As fascinated by the web as I am, I
have been reading a lot of blogs lately. And I have to say, a lot
of them are really dopey. (No names.) Give a thousand monkeys a
thousand typewriters and eventually theyll write an issue of Night
Nurse, or create a blog. And except for a very few sites, I realized
they can pretty much be safely ignored. When you give everyone a voice,
no one can hear everything.
Yes I wrote that.
And my first thought when I got caught was to reprint the entire 1300
word column where I go into the history of the internet, the history of
blogging, my history of blogging, famous writers who blog, the
evolution of blogs from goth outpourings to one of the most important
means of disseminating news, writers who have good blogs, how blogging
evolved from the great letterhacks of the 70s and 80s, the
phenomenon of blogrolling, and the possible future of blogging. I
especially wish H. had quoted the very next graf. But he didn't. And
Im not going to.
What I wrote in a newspaper with no online outlet doesnt matter to the
blogosphere. That was for people who read CBG. Only the bit quoted out
of context online is what matters online. What you read in print stays
in print. Ive already got a hoard of angry bloggers with pitchforks
storming my castle.
First off, I believe it was H
at Comic Treadmill who broke the scandal. In his (or her) very
first graf, H sums up my crime thusly. "In it, Heidi comes to the
conclusion that there are too many bloggers
and that the abundance of people with web sites discussing comics is a
bad thing."
Well, not quite...I said they could be ignored. I didn't mean they had
to stop. A fine point perhaps, but it's this misunderstanding that
seems to have fueled the fury of the blogosphere, which can be seen at Thought
Balloons, David
Fiore (where I am branded with "technocratic hubris"), Ringwood
Ragefuck who implies that I'm mean and petty, Near
Mint Heroes, who thinks I am threatened by bloggers (a
conclusion I acknowledged was possible in my column, as H reported), Johnny
Bacardi who generally heaps me with scorn ("This really irritates
the shit out of me, because while she's entitled
to her opinion, she is obviously putting herself on a pedestal which
I'm not so sure one should put oneself on."), Sean
T. Collins, who compares me to someone named Alan Beam -- the link
is broken but it's from Boston so it better not have anything to do
with the Red Sox, grrrrrrr-- Franklin
Harris, who takes a shot at Jen Contino along the way...and
probably more I've missed. Man it was a busy day!
Anyway, if anyone would like to discuss the actual column, as printed,
go right ahead.
But here is a discussion of the bit that made it online.
At the current moment I have a private blog for recording links, this
blog, which I have for emergencies such as the present, 3
websites (I think), a forum,
a newssite with visitors in the six figures, and 20 or 25 email
addresses. Im using this crappy, ugly AOL blog to take on the
blogosphere just to be different, I suppose.
Do I hate blogging? Of course not. Ive been doing it since 1993. Do I
hate bloggers? How can you hate half the human race? Do I hate the
comics blogosphere? No. Why then the "dopey" comment?
Cuz some of them are. Come on. I find it amusing that everyone thought
I wastalking about them in the dopey part and NOT the part where I
praised blogging. I do feel bad about that. So many of the comments
directed at me were cries in the wilderness:
Ken at Ringwood: We blog because we love it. We do it for
no money and
can only hope for the faintest wisp of praise. And that is enough.
Don't you think that's worth
something, Heidi?
Shane Bailey: The fact that Heidi
feels like that is a bad thing just makes me feel
pity for her. Is that so wrong Heidi? Is it so wrong to talk about what
we love? I love my little dopey site and I know others who do too. I do
it for them. Not you.
Yes yes. YES. Yes. In the words of Bono, "Love love, love love, love
love." In the words of Mr. Spock "Captain,too much
of anything, even. love, isn't necessarily a good thing."
But one man's love can be
another person's tedium. I don't read the blogs that bore
me. Or I read them once in a while.I really don't have time for a lot
of blogrolling (which thisvery blog entry is, actually) a point I addressed in the
column that no one read. And people who post about what they ate for
breakfast, and what records they listened to while they did it and so
on are no substitute for journalism. For instance, I like how Johanna
Draper Carlson keeps her blog (started as a diet aid) separate from her
review site. One is journalism (albeit unpaid) one is self-expression.
And I do post about what I had for breakfast on my forum. Is it dopey?
Sure!
But I don't feel that just because somone has a blog means they have something "important" to
say. This is made particularly poignant by the affair of Heidis blog
which several of my critics alluded to. (Man, this must have really
baffled people.) I must admit this event left me stunned. Sure I was
fooling around with a Blogger blog. As I mentioned before, I already
have 2 blogs. Im a packrat. This was one of them. I had recently started
fooling around with Mozilla Composer and thought tinkering with the
Blogger template would be a good way to learn it. And MAYBE I would
have a blog atthe end of it. Maybe. If it looked the way I wanted it
to. So I did. And then I made the fatal mistake of putting in links.
The next morning at least three people had linked to it.
The thing which astonished me about the whole affair was that the
entire content of my purported blog was nothing but greek text to test
text color against various colored backgrounds. No content whatsoever.
One blogger commented something like Its lite on content so far.
Like
duh! If a blog falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it
have any trackbacks? Basically what I learned from this was that you
could post absolute rubbish and still have it embraced in the
blogosphere.
So no, I never had a blog. A public blog anyway. You guys can say I did
if it makes you feel better.
There are a couple of bits in the uproar that have bothered me, I must
admit. Kevins comment that
"I find it odd that
Heidi holds so many comics blogs in such low regard, particularly given
that, on its best days, "The
Beat"
is little more than a blog that repeats nuggets of news and gossip that
already appeared on other blogs and websites."
hurt a little. The Beat has been called a blog over and over and over
again, and maybe it was by todays standards, In olden days it would
have been known as a gossip column. In addition, I think 90% of the
columns included original reporting, whether it was photos from some
party, reports on the same, or other information passed along to me
either willingly or unwillingly. I guess if there is a source of
personal annoyance on my part its that in a completely egalitarian
world, someone sitting down to write about what they ate for breakfast
is afforded the same amount of recognition as something that took me
all week to research and write. And no Im not saying you should
all bow down in front of the altar of The Beat and worship. Im just
saying you get what you pay for. And the reality, as I said in my
column which only H has read, is that cream rises to the top and the
best Blogs will get more recognition and so on. (And doesn't blogger Legomancer begin to show just a trace of blognnui here?)
In conclusion, I am sorry that the endof my column in CBG was written
a bit hastily. I pretty much wrote that entire column stream of
consciousness in one sitting. I had a mental outline, and a mental idea
of whereIneeded to be in my argument by what word count,but
sometimes Icame up a little short, and in the blogging column I
definitely ran out of room toward the end.
So to put it all to rest once and for all. EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO
BLOG
SHOULD. FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IS THE GREATEST FREEDOM OUR SOCIETY HAS
TO OFFER. ANYONE WHO SITS DOWN AND DOES IT EVERY DAY DESERVES
PRAISE FOR THEIR HARD WORK IF NOTHING ELSE. COMICS BLOGGING SHOULD
EXIST AND ANYONE WHO WANTS TO SHOULD DO IT. I LOVE YOU KEVIN MELROSE,
AND JOHN JAKALA, AND GRAEME MCMILLAN, AND FRANKLIN HARRIS, AND ELAYNE
RIGGS, AND SEAN T COLLINS AND NEILALIEN AND JOHNNY BACARDI and whoever I've forgotten. You can
put "Endorsed by Heidi MacDonald, the venom spitting technocrat" on
your blog if you want.
But just because someone has a blog doesn't make them Edward R. Murrow
or Carrie Nation. That's all I'm saying.
superlime at 11:07:00 PM EDT Blog about this entry |
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I'm starting my first blog.. there is alot of things I don't know how to do.. could anybody help me? like everytime I want to add a picture comes this square thing and the pic in the middle with a note above it if the person want's to enlorge it or not.. it looks ugly.. I didn't want this square to show and the pic in the middle.. could anybody help me please ? I really liked your blog.. keep up the hard work !
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Ironically, I was having lunch in a comic shop last week when someone asked, "just what exactly is a blog anyway." This was due mainly to the fact I've added a link in my sig to the "Tony Kornheiser recap blog" that I'm now writing.
And, 30 seconds later, I open to CBG to read while eating my lunch and, boom, there was H's column. So I just said, "Here. This will probably explain it better than I can."
End of anecdote.
Personally, I prefer message boards to blogging, since I like that kind of interaction better on the former than the latter. However, I may start a "real blog" for reviews and what not, since I'm too lazy to constantly update the magazine's webpage. :>
mark coale
odessa steps magazine -
I think it's *impossible* to discern what is valuable in current culture, because "value" is not intrinsic to a work of art. It accrues over time."Experts" would need crystal balls to ferret out the masterpieces! What's wrong with just saying that a lot of people pay attention to your critiques (and riff on them in turn) because they appreciate your writing (as opposed to accepting you as an "Authority")?
Dave -
David: right....so to go back to your "there are no absolutes in aethetics" statement...it's true if we're talking about something that came out 50 years ago but not if we're talking about something new?
I would submit that discerning what is valuable in the current culture is very difficult, that's why seeking out the opinions and analysis of *those who are knowledgable about the subject* is far more important.
7/24/04 6:36 AM
KG