A funny thing happened on the way to the December Cites & Insights.
Finished the November issue in mid-October. Check. Posted it. Check. Took a couple of days to clean up the pieces (updating the volume index, etc.) and look at the burgeoning folders for future issues. Check.
Sort-of figured out what I’d probably write about for December: A piece (most likely a big piece) on the Open Content Alliance and Google Print Library Project, including some ©2 issues–that’s the thickest folder. Maybe a ©3 essay: Second thickest folder. After an interesting multiway email exchange, it seemed likely that I’d do a followup on the Net Media Perspective, probably a “mea culpa” (turns out I’m not in a good position to judge the presence or absence of Established Voices within the biblioblogosphere).
Two perspectives that I knew I wanted to write: A relatively short one on “Life Trumps Blogging” (no, I didn’t originate the term–a bunch of Christian/Bible bloggers were using “Real life trumps blogging” in 2002/2003, but I didn’t know about any of that) and another one about library and media futures, finally offering my comments on Blake Carver’s “Where do we fit?” essay at LISNews.
I started out with the last one. And wound up with around 16,000 words. Typically, a 22-page issue has room for around 16,300 words, and I definitely wanted the last issue of the year to be reasonably well-balanced, with four to seven pieces. Well, that wasn’t going to work.
So I set it aside and wrote the “Life Trumps Blogging” perspective. That went well, and came in at around 2,800 words–a good length.
I set both of them aside and wrote two columns with late November or early December deadlines–the next “PC Monitor” for Online and the next “disContent” for EContent.
Then I tried to cut the “Library Futures, Media Futures” perspective down to size (6,000 words at most). And utterly failed. Even though, reading through it, I can see that it will probably make me even less in demand as a hot speaker and more subject to the kind of dismissive “Luddite” / “curmudgeon” labeling that seems to pass for argumentation in some blogs these days.
So, with a mild amount of trepidation…well, see the next post. Addition: “Next” chronologically, which means you’ve probably already read it.
