Just back from this morning's Washington Independent Writers Fiction Seminar panel on writers's blogs--- with fiction writer and journalist Wendi Kaufman (The Happy Booker), novelist Leslie Pietrzyk (Work-in-Progress), freelancer and improv artist Shawn Westfall, blogger for Dcist.com, and poet Deborah Ager of 32 Poems. I'd had no idea that Wendi got the idea to start her blog (one of the first and best lit-blogs out there, by the way) after her eight year-old son launched one for Pokemon characters. And wow, Deborah is a wordpress wizard! But to the point:
To blog or not to blog, I repeat, that is not the question. A blog, supposedly, is a web (on-line) log, or diary or journal. I say no, it's anything you want it to be. Call it a newsletter. Or take a newsletter and call that a blog. It could be an on-line magazine column. Updated once a year. Updated eight times a day. Longish personal essays, whole books, pictures with or without commentary, or, say, nothing but lists of links to kitty videos on Youtube. Did I mention videos of people crying while eating? Mustaches of the 19th century! Some blogs invite comments, others (such as this one) do not (though if you want to send me an e-mail, click here). It's the Wild Get Out of Dodge West. So what I'm saying is, if you're on-line in any way, you might as well accept it, it's a Web 2.0 world, morphing at warp speed--- and you might as well consider what you do blogging. For lack of a better word. We do not have an adequate vocabulary for any of this. More anon...specifically:
---->The main misconception about "blogs"
----> Making time for blogging (why and how) and my Bushman (and I do not mean the W) goes to Whole Foods analogy.
---->The perplexing problem with print-outs of blog posts.
---->Then, Maximilian galore, new pix & more.
---->To view the archive of Madam Mayo on blogging, click here
