A Good Start
This morning I was up before six. I went for a bike ride on the beach, moving fast but not as fast as the pelican skimming the surf beside me, looking for breakfast. Kiawah runs pretty much east-west, and I rode toward the orange glow of the rising sun until it came up over the dunes. Then I rode to the marsh. The ocean is primordial, the marsh is, I don't know, Jurassic--full of grasses and fish and birds and reptiles that seem unchanged and basic. I watched a large gator move through the water, and the fish leaping above the surface to avoid it, and an ibis perched on a stump, and the sun changing the multiple hues of green and brown marsh grass. Then I pedaled home, where even Elijah the early riser was still sleeping, and had a cup of coffee and read til the kids got up.
Dreaming of a Blog Taxonomy
Before my early start I was dreaming of a blog taxonomy. In my dream, Doc Searls and I were talking about the overhyped rift between "warbloggers" and "tech bloggers"--a tempest in a teapot that even sparked an article in the New York Times. In real life, Doc called bullshit on the alleged contretemps. In my dream, Doc (I've never met him in person) and I were eating at a (nonexistent) Italian restaurant in Greensboro. We agreed that there are so many different types of blogs and bloggers that this convenient bifurcation of the blogging universe is a joke. When I woke up, I realized I had dreamed the truth.
Warbloggers are just people writing about current events. If it wasn't the war, it would have been something else that captured the public's attention at the moment that blogging was taking off. I find pundits--whether highly paid bloviators on TV or freebies on the Web--to be highly uninteresting for the most part. Opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one, and most of the time these folks are parroting each other and sticking to party lines instead of thinking for themselves. It's mostly boring when that Carlson dweeb with the bowtie and the Carville serpent do it on the tube, and it's mostly boring when some anonymous person blogs it.
There are many, many kinds of blogs. A taxonomy of blogging will take years to codify. Techies are a real constituency, but many of them cover a lot more than tech. Wannabe pundits, war-oriented or not, are another constituency (snore). Sex, drugs, rock and roll, personal diaries, gardening, space exploration, commercial endeavors...the possibilities of blogging are pretty much congruent with the scope of human interest. Naming blogotypes will fascinate some people. I think I'll just read and write instead.
Paging Dr. Freud
Also in my dream, Doc had a number one album on the charts, nouveau-psychedelia in style. He was wearing a top hat on the cover. Is this because I see him as an early star of the blogging game?
9:30:12 AM 
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