Walt at Random

Just a little digital dusting…

So Blaise Cronin does one of those silly attacks on blogging, “the blogosphere” manages to simultaneously prove his point and refute it (that is, a whole bunch of stupid name-calling goes on, along with a fair amount of cogent, well-written criticism), and Dean Cronin “responds” with a piece that cites the worst of the blogosphere (anonymously, of course) and ignores the best.

Point proved. Both Cronin’s point, by selective evidence, and the points of his better critics, by his response.

I did write briefly about this situation when it first heated up. I don’t think I have any new points to make that I didn’t already make in Cites & Insights 5:6.

Except for one little item I’d forgotten. Checking C&I indexes to see what I’d said about Cronin in the past, I was reminded that he appeared as an expert witness in the CIPA case. Supporting CIPA, that is. My comment at the time was:

Cronin’s rebuttal to expert testimony…strikes me as astonishing and considerably lowers my respect for Dr. Cronin.

It’s fair to say that this latest brouhaha does not restore that respect.

A while back, I wrote about my new “subnotebook”. A progress report may be in order. To date, I’ve made 22 entries.

Three of those are reminders that I more-or-less have to do certain C&I pieces in the next few months: A followup on printability, the honest-as-possible 10-year review of Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness & Reality, and…well, the third one will remain silent for now.

Eight other entries have resulted in postings here. So far, none of them have resulted in a C&I essay, but it’s early yet.

The remaining entries will either turn into essays or posts, or I’ll decide they’re no longer interesting when I tear the first few pages out. So far, so good. (Except that my wife, who didn’t know about the notebook, decided she needed something similar–and found an even smaller edge-bound memo pad. Twice as expensive, but I know what I’ll buy when–if–this one’s full.)

Finally, I just read a commentary on why “blogging” is a terrible word–I don’t remember where I read it, or I’d link. I don’t want to get into the vocabulary discussion, but what astonished me was the person’s discussion of how they prepare blog entries:

• First they write out the post in longhand, on a legal pad.
• Then they key it into Word for spell-checking and review.
• Then they paste it into a weblog tool for publication.

I’m impressed. Here’s how I prepare a weblog entry:

• Log in to WordPress, click on “Write.”
• Choose categories (which I’m clearly bad at, given my struggles in finding old posts)
• Write the post.
• Click “Save as Draft” so WordPress will show me a formatted preview.
• Fix any grotesque HTML errors and click Publish.

That’s it. I suppose it shows in the results. The only exceptions are postdated entries (a few of which are on the way, and I’ll explain why they were postdated after they appear, if I remember)–and even those were written directly within WordPress, in one sitting.

But then, I certainly don’t aspire to literary greatness in this blog!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 23rd, 2005 at 8:01 pm and is filed under Media, Writing and blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.