Lanham on generosity. In an interview published by U Chicago Press, Richard Lanham describes a key element of the internet:

One of the great surprises, at least to me, about the internet-based information explosion is the extraordinary human generosity which it has revealed. People want to share their information, their enthusiasms, their way of looking at the world and now they have a new and infinitely more effective way to do it. It may be what they know about Barbie dolls, or about digital cameras, or the specifications of sewer pipe for your house-the range is infinite. It is far more surprising, at least to me, how often people want to give this information away than how they want to be paid for it. So, how to explain the "enormous flow of free information"? Emphatically, not just in the expectation of future profit. Quite the opposite. This generosity of spirit has not been so remarked as it ought to have been.

The site also includes an excerpt from The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. [0 & P]

Not a genre. (From the Old News Department.) Blogging is not a genre. A blog begins as a piece of publishing software, with a few basic traits that make it easy to set up a web site where regular postings appear in reverse chronological order in the main column. The ease of publishing, the reverse chronological order, and a few other web and software traits help writers establish a readership. The various genres of blogging arise out of the neutral space created by the publishing software, the urgencies of an author's life, and the influence that audience and contemporary events add to the mix. There is no genre as simple as the one term, blogging. See, for example, this sentence from Jay Rosen's profile note on Twitter:

I don't do lifecasting but mindcasting on Twitter.

Here Rosen announces the genre choice he makes as a blogger, a choice he elaborates on elsewhere, I seem to recall but can't pin down right now, when he recommends that a writer focus on one issue or topic. He works on the topic of journalism, especially on the changes required for journalists to meet the current crisis and evolve a new form or forms. He doesn't tell us what he had for lunch or whether he's about to call it a day. No lifecasting -- instead, he tracks his observations and engages others who care about the same subject matter.

Enough people choose lifecasting, and in fact choose an alarmingly personal version of lifecasting, to give passersby the impression that blogging is the one genre. Or maybe there is a second genre, the political blog, and passersby spot the two kinds and feel they've got it figured out. The mistake here is not just thinking that there are only one or two approaches, but also in thinking that the written posts are the genre. They are not, or not entirely. The posts are the places where the genre puts its feet down for a moment as it walks along. The genre is, rather, the motion of writer through experience of self, events, text, and audience. It's a self-observation, a self-recording, and an engagement with experience and with others, all tracked and promoted and provoked further along its way with texts that are the traces. Blogging is a reflective practice that casts off texts as it goes. [0 & P]

Focus on craft. There's a kind of blog that focuses on the craft of something -- the book design blogs I mentioned recently, the chess and wine blogs I've looked at from time to time. These tend to give away good information, invite exchange, as other blogs do, but they have the additional trait of having a subject matter that breaks neatly into practical or concentrated little or medium-sized pieces.

I suppose an editor could put up a little passage to be edited once or twice a week and offer an approach to it, and after a year the person would have created a nice little body of work to share. If it were organized in some way, it could be very useful.

A meterologist could do something focused in the same way. Some fields seem well-suited to it. It could be an informal way of drafting a book, too. I suppose that is what has happened at Chocolate & Zucchini, now that books have started coming out there. Very nice hazelnut cream balls coated in dark chocolate -- recipe we tried from the book the other day, by the way. [0 & P]

Book design blogs. I'm a big fan of the blog and regular email updates from the Book Design Review, the work of Joseph Sullivan. Today's email / blog entry, for example, introduces a striking cover design by David Drummond and links to the designer's blog, with the appealing note that Drummond shows some of the process of his creative work there, rather than just the products -- well in keeping with the spirit of certain kinds of blogs.

Sullivan's entries often comment briefly on a new book cover, always show at least one version of the design -- sometimes the same book from different countries, or the hardback and paper covers, eg. Several people usually talk over the design in the comments sections, too. I have no standing in the world of book design, but when I had to help bring a book to press last fall I found it very helpful to see how good designers were talking about the work they do. What do insiders look for? What is old hat or fresh, in their eyes? What are the elements of their craft? They share this sort of thing on these blogs -- you get to look in, since the sites aren't really aimed at outsiders particularly, I'd guess.

Sullivan also points to designer Henry Sene Yee, whose blog, he notes, also shares elements of the creative process too.

Principles here?: give away good information, written clearly, with lively images; create a place for conversation about practice; do it all for your own purposes but in a spirit that novices and fans and the curious don't feel excluded. Let the light in on the thinking and creativity of your field. [0 & P]

Follow-up from Jay Rosen. The other day I summarized an old posting by Jay Rosen in which he describes his own practice as a blogger. He was kind enough to email and clarify something I might have given the wrong impression about: he was not seeking to impose an approach to blogging on others. Intead, he was reporting his own method, created over time to serve his own purposes as a writer. For example, he pointed out that not everyone's software will handle all five of the elements of a posting that he aims for on his site.

Thanks, Jay, for helping me correct a wrong impression in the earlier posting, and for all the good work you do.

When I was writing that entry, I emphasized all the elements of Jay's process / product because I think we do a better job when we're ambitious enough to want not just posting but also a good exchange of views afterward. A striking title, a subtitle that elaborates interestingly (if your software will do this), a good little essay, links to other sites that follow up on the posting, and the comments entered on your own site -- that's a good formulation, whether it suits everyone or not.

Each element has an ethical role, perhaps? In a title (and subtitle, if you include that), do justice to the issue and content so as to earn and win the attention of the audience. In the body of the posting, give something substantial that fulfills the promise you've implied in the title and that repays a reader for the time that could have been spent otherwise. In the links to other sites, honor the possibility that your work could be deepened by the insights of others. In the comments, have the guts to listen and respond and let your ideas be tested to see how they stand up.

Political sites that want to win arguments rather than work on ideas take the ethical demands of the four or five elements rather differently, don't they? Eg.:

Obama is a fool. (or, if you prefer: McCain is a fool.) Anecdote that I will only look at from one perspective that proves by its single instance the sweeping thing I want it to prove. An explanatory term or two so dripping with point of view that dialogue becomes difficult once the term arises. A little name-calling directed at those who disagree. Then, either no comments, comments heavily screened to support my point of view, or a comments section where yelling at others and name-calling rules the day.

Something like that, then, with an entirely different ethical stance than the elements Jay sketched in that entry some years ago with such care to avoid imposing one path upon other bloggers. [0 & P]

Formalist challenge of Twitter. Now I find I'm approaching Twitter like a formalist poet who likes to have the imagination provoked by the restrictions of a given form. You only get 17 syllables, or the next line must rhyme, or there must be a recognizable rhythm, etc. As you face the restriction, you see novel solutions, things you wouldn't have said, or said that way, otherwise. Two tries:

Quoted: "People congratulated me when my son was born, but I worried even then. He will be drafted in 8 years. We'll probably be at war."

Or:

Caulking the tub--needed it done long ago. Revised a line of a poem--days after writing, it's easier to see what's off. Wait, or don't wait. [0 & P]

Twitter-free zone. I noticed that I never got Twitter to make sense -- never felt the energy. Now this not-in-the-spirit-of-things thought: Twitter would make a handy To Do list. Now that's rather anti-social of me. I'll keep trying. [0 & P]

Rosen on the five elements. I noticed in an old posting by Jay Rosen that he sees the care and tending of the conversation that follows a blog posting to be one of the five essential elements of blogging, as well as a responsibility of the writer. It's interesting that he sees different demands being placed upon the writer by each of the five elements -- they are different genres, I guess. And as thoughtful as the essay section might be, he claims that the thinking goes on in the forum that follows it:

In this example, The Tipping Point, there are five fields that get filled in: the title, the subtitle, the essay, the “after matter” (with notes, reactions and links) and the comments. Each requires of me a different kind of writing. The title condenses what the post is about, and arrests attention. The subheading explains the argument, previewing the “story” in the essay. The essay is an essay, but with links— a gesture unto themselves. The “after” section edits and tracks the wider discussion in the blog sphere. The comments begin the dialogue.

A successful post is when all five parts talk to each other as they are read against one another. A PressThink entry is not “done” until the after matter, trackbacks and comments come in, which sometimes takes more than a week. That’s one cycle in the turning of a weblog. When it works (always a hit and miss thing) the post at some point turns into a forum on the subject that occasioned the post— and the forum is what “thinks.” Of course, I didn’t know about this stylesheet and the posting logic it enforces until after I had stumbled on it through trial and error.

So the whole single genre of blogging is made up of the five elements; blogging is the collaborative project, not merely the essay or shorter posting by the soloist. That's a step farther than most of us have probably called it. When I'm not attending to all five elements, I'm not really blogging, Rosen implies about 1/3 of the way into his explanatory posting.

("Questions and Answers About PressThink," 4/29/04)) [0 & P]

A small ethical blogging decision. An email arrives congratulating the blogger on being in the top 100 bloggers of some kind or another. Curious, the blogger visits the site, sees that it is probably an attempt to draw links, since the list of 101 blogs -- miscounted, for some reason! -- doesn't really say much about them and doesn't otherwise have much to do with the site's mission. So, does the blogger link to the list of 101 blogs because it's kind of handy to have the list, or ignore it because it's probably a gimmick? One of life's little decisions. [0 & P]

A progression of values. The University of Iowa flood blog is still on my mind as the waters there start to recede from the twenty campus buildings near the river's ordinary path. There is a kind of progression of values in the work published there.

First, people needed information so they could respond to the threat.
Second, the university presents itself constructively through this public relations vehicle.
Third, to some degree in the photographs of sandbagging volunteers and somewhat further in the accounts of meaningful experiences gathered on a second IU site, the flood stories blog, they open the forum to other voices. It's not the free-for-all of a chat room or a wiki, but it moves in the direction of community speech, in this case still controlled by the university as publisher.

Elsewhere, people on their own sites are claiming more authority to talk about the experiences, and perhaps some of these sites will gather people together for further action.

It's difficult to imagine a university going much further, responding as it does to so many constituencies and pressures. Can a campus have a forum more open than these two flood blogs? Does the university's vision of its own authority even leave room for such a consideration? I'm not sure it does.

And yet other people are free to start this kind of conversation any time on their own sites. If they do, would the university engage? Would it suffer if it chose not to engage?

I'm puzzled, not entirely clear-headed about it, not entirely optimistic. But the flood blog shows the university speaking differently than it usually does, and that makes me wonder about the possibility of something more far-reaching that survives the ending moments of the emergency: institutional speech beyond public relations and practicalities. There's a hint of it here, at least a hint. [0 & P]