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why i read
I know that the fundamental unit of the weblog is the link, but I recently realized that I rarely click on the links posted by the authors of the weblogs I enjoy.
I can lump most of the weblogs I read into two basic camps. (I'm excluding here the weblogs I read that are maintained by people I know personally, which I read for, well, personal purposes.)
One camp is distinguished by an alignment I feel with the cultural tastes of the author. "This person likes some of the same stuff I do," goes the logic, "therefore they might also write about stuff that I would like, if I knew about it." For instance, let's say this LiveJournal, run by an experimental / psychedelic music fan. The other camp is distinguished by my interest in the ideas of the author. The author thinks about things in an interesting way, or lives an interesting sort of life, and I'm curious about the way they see things. For instance: Alamut, or Jessamyn's journal, or Synthetic Zero, or Texting. The important thing here is not so much the alignment between my ideas and theirs—I mean, all of these people are at least a bit like me, but my main interest is in seeing the world through a different lens.
Ideas, cultural products. Writing about either of these can be accentuated by links, but the link isn't fundamental.
I guess there's a third type of blog I read, what Jill would call a research blog, where the author (or authors) deliberately makes a point of linking to articles that are relevant to their research. I read the ones that are relevant to my own research, and this is the one case where I follow the links fervently.
Along these lines: Eastgate's Mark Bernstein has a weblog. Labels: weblogs |
Friday, July 19, 2002
12:10 PM
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