Proper Person
From Troubled Diva via London Mark:
You know you're a "proper" weblogger when...
- You ditch the standard template you grabbed off the shelf when you first started blogging, in favour of a design of your own making
- Within seconds of starting my Blogger account way back in 2000, yes.
- You start caring about what happens in The Bloggies
- yes, Though that one and out the other side. I no longer care again.
- You get listed on Daypop or Blogdex
- yes, see Meme Creation thing below
- You discover that you're in the Google Top Ten for something completely unlikely and unintended, which generates loads of hits
- Yes. Number two hit for "Fuckwit" before most of these new bloggers had even started.
- People start leaving you sneery, snarky, anonymous comments
- No. Not as yet, anyway.
- You purchase your own domain name
- Er, yeah, but that was before I was a blogger
- You migrate from Blogger to Movable Type
- Sort of. Migrated away from Blogger before MT was even released.
- You start a "meme" (ahem).
- Yeah, the ESF thing probably counts
- You stop participating in "memes" (ahem) and online personality quizzes (as well as re-posting chain e-mail "funnies"), because you're above all that now
- I no longer take quite as many tests, and they have their own seperate page now anyway.
- You string loads of other weblog names together in the middle of a post, in one great long list of linky-love
- Not my style, doll. Apart from the UK Blogs Meet
- You start dropping cute little in-jokes into the main body of your posts, which only a tiny handful of other webloggers will understand
- I don't think I do this. Do I do this?
- You attend a Blogmeet
- Check
- You make a submission to the Mirror Project
- Not yet
- You register your site with Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati, Blogtree, Blogstreet, Blogwise, the Ageless Project, the Eatonweb Portal, GeoURL, Is My Blog Hot Or Not?, the UK Weblogs list
- Some of the above.
- You set up an RSS feed
- Yeah, and define a better syndication format while I'm at it.
- You start saying things like: actually, I've started to find the whole terminology surrounding so-called "blogging" so limiting these days, because you know, I don't really feel that I fit the definition of a "blogger" any more, and couldn't we all start to move away from these wholly arbitrary restrictions, because I suppose that if anything, I would consider myself more of a "personal publisher", but even then I feel
- It's a journal, some of it is diary, some of it is more classic weblog. Stop it with the bloody monochromatics, people! We are allowed to fit into more than one pigeon-hole.
If that's what makes a "proper" weblog, then I think I'll stay improper, thanks.
HTML was broken, so some answers were for the wrong question which was hidden by missing quotes. Ickky
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Burningbird:
I wonder if there’s any real harm in all of us not meeting? Seems to be the new ‘meme’ in weblogging now—meeting in real life.
And then we get together in real life, and turn away from each other to weblog about it.
Can we all say “screwed up disconnect”?
Aquarion:
I’d disagree. The UKBlog meeting was lots of fun, there were conversations (in the “dialogue” sense rather than the monologue/countermonologue that weblog/comment conversations tend to be), there were realtime discussions on the past, present and future of weblogging, and I found new people though it whose weblogs I now read daily. (And must add them to the blogroll, but I digress).
There was no mobloging of any kind in the basement of the Green Man, where the meeting was. This is because the basement of the GM, I know from experience, has the mobile phone coverage of pluto. This meant people actually talking, rather than blogging about talking, which helped lots.
But the best, and most important, bit was that those people whose weblogs I read before the meet (and there were only a couple) I now find much easier to read because they come across in the voice of the person who writes it. It makes misunderstandings less easy.
There is no bad thing in us not meeting, which is fortunate because short of my unbought lottery ticket winning the jackpot I’m unlikely to make it to any US-side meetings where most of the people whose blogs I read congregate. On the other hand, person-to-person meetings are usually fun.
mike:
Interesting, as is the attached Trackback entry. God, but I do hope people realise I was being satirical when I made that list…
Vaughan:
When I was a wide-eyed young blogger, I was fond of blogmeets. Then I became older and more bitter, cynical and twisted – and thought they were the spawn of Satan and stayed away for all my life was worth. Now that I’m reaching the level of blogging senility, I’m beginning to think once again that they’re a good thing. Because, in reality, we’re just a bunch of sad geeks – and if we didn’t meet up once in a while we’d probably all stay indoors getting sallow skin from staring at our monitors for too long, wouldn’t we? At least this way we can all see a bit of daylight, get some nourishment inside us (or “alcohol” as we call it), and play with our gadgets in public (that’s not a euphemism, by the way – well, not unless you want it to be).
I think I’d better stop now, before I insult everyone. :-)
Mark:
Well, I quite enjoyed meeting up at the Green Man, so does that make me a “wide-eyed young blogger”. I rather hope so. I hope, though, that it doesn’t make me a sad geek even though I am prepared to admit that daylight and nourishment are both good things, neither of which I encounter often.
I refuse to play with my gagdet in public, however. Exhibitionism is not for me.