If you want, you can tag me as the kind of guy who needs to read it in the New York Times to know what to pay attention to, but look at the article in the Sunday Styles on Slow Blogging. Apparently, I'm part of a Thing, and I didn't know it. Slow Blogging is the opposite of the 20-posts-a-day, hyperactive zeitgiest blogs a la Andrew Sullivan. Like the Slows, I tend to write longish pieces about an idea, and I like them composed and cast as well as my writing ability will permit. I don't have three hyperlinks in every sentence, and I certainly don't have those horrible SnapShot popups attached to my links.
I mimic the blogs I like. Every blog in my feed is about ideas, some about photography, some about tech, some about writing and marketing, some about experiences I am unlikely to have (my latest favorite is from a guy stationed at a penguin colony in Antarctica) but they all share a storytelling component and are informative from a personal point of view. Blogs that might have useful information, but are mostly a collection of links to other sources, I soon tire of and I delete them from the feed—John Nack's Adobe blog comes to mind.
The Sunday Magazine this week also has an informative collection of articles around the theme of the new media landscape. Nothing will be big news to anyone professionally invested in the scene, but it helped me imagine what I am likely to be doing in a year or two, namely, being a content provider for lots of media formats I can't even imagine right now. I need to try and understand what is going on around me. However, I am of a generation for whom digital communication is not our first language. I write my blog like a middle aged guy who cares about language and writing. I refuse to Twitter, because it seems so antagonistic to a contemplative sensibility. So overviews like the New York Times (the doorstep edition, not the web version, though I do read it occasionally on my iPhone. It is an unsatisfactory experience.) are terrifically valuable to an outsider like me. It makes sense given that I am squarely in the center of their demographic.
Don't take that slow blogging too seriously. It's been a week and I keep checking. Must be something interesting happening out there...
Posted by: Chris Savery | November 30, 2008 at 04:09 PM