It’s the beginning of a new year and everyone is already struggling to keep up with their resolutions. But some bloggers are better prepared for the fight than others. Some bloggers actually have a SYSTEM. Yes, these are the lucky students of GTD, which is an acronym of “Getting Things Done,” an extremely popular productivity system developed by organizational guru, David Allen.
Remember when people basically used the internet to search for old boyfriends and pornography? No more. Now, the internet is a tool to help us become more productive. (By the way, shouldn’t rule #1 be to spend less time on the internet?)
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Nicole of Verbs Via Ones and Zeros is a writer in Hollywood. But she also is a woman with a scientific mind.
“Who are all these men answering personal ads in Craigslist?” she wondered.
Perhaps if she did a little science experiment, she could learn more. What would be the results if she posted three different types of personal ads, all of them for one day only — 4:30 Christmas Eve to midnight Christmas Day?
The three ads, as described by Nicole:
Ad 1: “Commitment”
This one was about how ready I am to be in a committed relationship.
Ad 2: “Unsure”
This one was about how I am just out of a long term relationship and am not sure what I want, i.e. committed relationship or fling.
Ad 3: “FWB”
This one was about how I don’t want anyone who will get attached, no commitments, just looking for a “friends with benefits” type of relationship.
Science proves that a woman (even without a photo!) can get 218 responses from men, with 45.1% of men being most enthusiastic about the “friends with benefits.”
What is most intriguing in Nicole’s “study” are the various ways men try to woo a woman online, including telling Nicole that he made a “kiss-ass cheescake,” invited her to a Scientology meeting, and the inevitable sending her “a naked picture of himself, at full “attention”, taken from his own POV on a disturbingly messy bed.”
Modern Romance.
Although Tom Reynolds of London’s “Random Acts of Reality” is anything but an underappreciated blogger, it’s time he was known as much in the States as he is in the U.K.
This might happen now:
The Friday Project is delighted to announce that it has secured the rights to ‘Random Acts of Reality’, a book based on the acclaimed online diary of London-based Emergency Medical Technician (E.M.T.), Tom Reynolds.
Tom began working as a nurse for the NHS at the age of 23. He worked in four hospitals but moved to the London Ambulance Service after realising that working in A&E was making him ‘want to torture patients’. Now, as an E.M.T., he has finally found his true calling - so much so that he has stopped torturing ‘all but the congenitally obnoxious… and drunks.’
Since 2003, Tom has kept an online diary (or ‘weblog’, or even ‘blog’), candidly recording every aspect of his daily working life. From the tragic to the hilarious, from the heartwarming to the terrifying, the stories Tom tells give a fascinating - and at times alarming - picture of life in inner-city Britain, and the people who are paid to mop up after it.
In today’s compelling blog post, Tom Reynolds writes about the poor staffing of ambulances in London, and his experience helping a young man with an asthma attack. And how they have to wait for an ambulance. And wait some more.
So the patient got a cab to hospital. At his insistence. The double dose of medicine had cleared his lungs up nicely, but he would probably need some short-term steroid treatment. I rechecked my assessment of him, and was happy that his physical condition was well enough to get a cab to hospital. But I wasn’t happy that there was no ambulance for this patient who actually warranted an ambulance.
As I write this I wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t responded to the medicine that I gave him.
You can read more on his site. This blogger definitely deserves this book deal.
We wish a Happy Holidays to our friends in the U.K. Be careful on New Year’s Eve with your partying — especially now that you know the ambulance situation in town.
Thank you for all the kind emails during the last few days saying that the Douchebrity parody of my post was just plain nasty. I had to restrain Sophia from flying over and punching this guy in the mouth.
“How would it look if Laura Bush yelled at the New York Times every time they criticized her husband?” I asked.
Even though the parody was mean, I didn’t take it too personally, mostly because I could have done a better job myself.
I was actually more hurt by Cowboy’s comment on Jack of All Blogs asking the question, “Seriously does anyone care about Neil Kramer?”
And the answer is, “Sure. Why not?”
Blogebrity asked me to write here in order to introduce others to some undiscovered talent — bloggers who write personal blogs — blogs written by truck drivers, ambulance-chasers, African-Americans, gays, sex addicts, and just plain crazy people.
Anything, as long as it was interesting.
I was impressed that Blogebrity asked me to do this, considering that they were mostly known for their infamous lists of A-B-C bloggers. I quickly learned that their “Blogebrity” attitude was more tongue-in-cheek than elitist.
But there are some out there who want the blogging world to be the same as the traditional media — where there is an elite that matters and those who do not.
Luckily, the blogging world doesn’t work that way. In blogging, it is the BLOGGERS that rule. It is the only “industry” where a housewife who writes about her kittens can compete with a professional journalist working for the New York Times — and frequently gets a more loyal audience. This is why newspapers, TV networks, and corporations are all starting blogs — they are scared of the power it gives to the general public, and want us to focus our attention back on them.
As scary as this might sound to me, there is nothing stopping my mother from going on the computer right now and creating a Blogger account in five minutes. And who knows? She might be very successful at it. She can write a blog about playing mah jongg. After all, communities have grown around every subject imaginable, from knitting to the Talmud.
Most of the blogging community is bored with blog-insiders who only write about blogging. Many blog-insiders have an elitist attitude that I’ve seen before in the worlds of publishing and television. They have a disdain and hatred for the very audience that they cater to. They want traffic. They want an audience. They want ad dollars. But they actually have no interest in the individuals who make up their own readership. It’s like the Hollywood TV network executives who sell some crappy new show to their Midwest affiliates, but then make fun of Midwesterners while they eat lunch at the Ivy.
So, Cowboy of Jack of All Blogs, I do find it odd that someone who writes a blog about blogging and bloggers would ask, “Seriously does anyone care about Neil Kramer?”
Because YOU should. I am a blogger. Everyone on my blogroll is a blogger. The only reason your blog about blogging exists is because someone like me reads it.
I am your audience.
If all you really “care about” are blogs by big blog networks, then let them be your audience. You and Douchebrity can spend your nights reading each other and laughing over insider jokes. For those interested in real bloggers, I invite you to click on all of the wonderful writers who are on my blogroll. Maybe some of you will actually learn who is out there in the blogosphere besides Nick Denton and Paul Scrivens.
Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukkah to personal bloggers everywhere you blog.
Leave it to a Blogebrity B-Lister, Washington D.C.-based Kris of “I’m not a Girl, not yet a Wino,” the self-proclaimed “David Hasselhoff of Blogger” to do the hard work of collecting together the best personal blog posts of 2005. Read it around the Yule log.
In other personal blog news, Dean of “Inspired by a True Story,” has started the Carnival of the Mundane, a new blog carnival that focuses on posts that “capture some of the humor or offer some insight into the experience of daily life.”
So, bloggers, remember to bring you laptops with you during New Year’s Eve, so after waking up with a hangover in a stranger’s bed, you can write about it in your blog.
The holiday season has become so commercialized, so today I searched through blog-land, looking for some spirituality. Luckily, I found Lynn of the Seattle-based blog, Sprigs. She was telling about her experience finding inner peace at a Catholic retreat doing “poustinia” — a time to meditate and have an inner journey toward self-awareness and selflessness.
“Here’s how poustinia works. You are led by a nun into a smallish, sparsely furnished room. The room includes a twin-sized bed, two lamps, a rocking chair with a small table next to it, and a desk with several items laid out on it ─ a pad of donated stationary, a pen, a copy of the Bible, and a brochure about poustinia and Madonna House. A ginormous cross hangs on the wall, and there is a little thingy to kneel on in front of the cross, in case you are moved to do so. The room does not have a door, only a curtain drawn across the doorway. The curtain doesn’t reach the floor; it stops about 9 inches above it. I guess the nuns want to have the option of looking underneath the curtain to ascertain what you are up to during your stay with them. As one “making a poustinia,” you are to stay in the room for 24 hours (though you can slip out quietly to use the restroom down the hall). During the 24-hour period, you cannot talk, and you cannot eat. (You can actually have tea and a little stale bread, but that’s it.)”
With nothing else to do, Lynn turned to the Bible. She had once heard some interesting rumors about the Song of Songs, mostly that it was as sexy as page 183 of Judith Krantz’s Princess Daisy.
Lynn read Song of Songs. Wow. She read it again and again.
“It must have been a couple of hours into my stay, after I’d filled up on bread and read through Song of Songs, when something finally stirred inside me. It was a strong sensation. Palpable. I was horny.
Horny as hell.”
Let’s just say Lynn “spiritualized” herself — seven times that day.
“Apparently, I had really managed to get in touch with myself… just not the way I’d anticipated.
What the hell? They say God works in mysterious ways.”
Remember Hurricane Katrina? It was one of the biggest stories of 2005? Remember how the whole world was focused on the tragedy? But we move pretty quickly in this society. Oprah bought some iPods for those who helped the victims. Copycat Dr. Phil bought some washing machines for the actual victims. It was time for the news media to turn to a new story.
Sadly,the problems are not really over. There is still turmoil going on the lives of Katrina victims. These problems are not ones of natural disaster, but of bureaucratic red tape.
Luckily, a blog titled DearFEMA has been set-up to help those in need. DearFema describes itself as:
A public archive of visitor submitted open letters to FEMA, public officials, insurance companies, and other public and private agencies. If you or a loved one were affected by the recent hurricanes and feel that you are getting ‘the short end of the stick’ from anyone this is the place to make it public. Submit your open letters and we will publish them. It is our hope that by bringing the stories of our visitors into the public eye we will shame public officials, FEMA, insurance companies, and others into doing the right thing.
Some of the letters are heart-breaking, some just angry, but DearFema is one way blogs are being used as a tool for advocacy and citizens’ rights.
Thanks to Steve at Cool Website Ideas.
2005: Blogged — Dispatches from the Blogosphere, edited by Tim Warstall (Friday Books) is another example that blogging has been noticed by the traditional media. While there are all sorts of “Best of 2005″ books and magazines out there now, this new book is one of the first, if not the first, that deals exclusively with blog posts. The editor, Tim Worstall, one of the UK’s top bloggers, goes through an entire year, picking out various posts that deal with 2005’s issues, both big and small, from Iraq to Michael Jackson.
This book is British and has a decidedly British slant to it — mostly political in nature. All of the bloggers are British or living in Britain, and many of the issues discussed will be unfamiliar to the American reader. However, it is interesting to see what “riles up” a blogger of another country. Some of the bloggers including in the collection are well-known bloggers that write blogs such as Complete Tosh, Blithering Bunny,and Norm Blog.
Although it is great that there is a book focusing solely on blogging posts, there is one big problem here — the fact that it is a book. A collection of various blog posts doesn’t truly capture what blogging is all about. Many of these blog posts could have just been published on the editorial page of a newspaper. While it is exciting that new voices are given a chance to be heard, I began to forget that I was reading a book about blogs. Without the community, the links, the comments — a blog post is more of a short essay or opinion piece. This is all fine, of course, but it misses out on what makes blogging so much a part of our lives — not to compete with the mainstream media, but to communicate with other bloggers.
This book showcases some great new British writing talent, but it fails to show us why 2005 was such a watershed year for the blogging community.
Dave Simmer at Blogography seems like a nice enough guy. He writes about pop culture. He draws cute cartoons. And he makes up stories using Legos. Who would guess that he would be on the Most Hated List by religious people all across the country?
Remember that internet phenomenon during the summer about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which poked fun at “intelligent design?” Dave created his own little humorous drawing using a cartoon image of himself (along with a monkey friend) as a stand-in for the BIG GUY himself. Six months later, he still gets hate mail about this:
They started out preaching fire and brimstone, then settled into a series of scripture quotes, then said they love me, then say they will pray for me, then threatened me with eternal damnation in hell if I don’t stop mocking The Almighty. This was not the first time, but I never get tired of hearing it.
You’d think that the fact I’m rendered as a cartoon and have a screaming monkey with me would be a big clue that I’m not actually serious about being God, but apparently there is room for confusion here.
Dave seems to have a knack for insulting people of religion in new and strange ways. To stop internet crooks from stealing his bandwidth, he enabled hotlink protection. If someone tried to hotlink a photo, they would end up getting a cartoon of a guy’s ass with a lipstick “kiss” on it. He thought it was pretty cute and tasteful. That is, until he got an angry email from someone stealing one of Dave’s photos for a Christian fellowship forum.
After the emailer threatened to sue, Dave responded:
“Let me get this straight. You steal an image from me without asking permission, fail to give me credit for said image, and then threaten to sue me because you’re not a very clever thief? Just exactly how big of a dumbass are you?”
Dave, I can’t wait to see the next blog you start — you know, the one you’ll be writing from Hell!
I’m sitting in a movie theater in Hollywood, crying over two gay cowboys, when it occurs to me that I promised Sophia to go “country dancing” this Saturday at a bar in the Valley. What if there are some real cowboys there? I don’t want to offend anyone by saying the wrong thing. How do I know if a cowboy is gay? Luckily Brenner Thomas of Not Only But Also just got his “Brokeback Mountain” promotional bandanna and explains to his readers the traditional “gay hankie code.”
While not used as often as in the past, the color of a hankie in a gay man’s back pocket signals to the rest of the community what he’s into. The Brokeback Mountain promotional bandanna is navy. What does that mean?
I couldn’t remember. “Robin-egg blue is oral, fuchsia is something aggressive, like double-fisting or something.”
Brenner tries an experiment and walks around with the Brokeback Mountain hanky in his pocket, but he doesn’t get any comments or even a smile. What ever happened to tradition in the gay community?
Hopefully, this blog post will revive the arcane tradition. and just in case you were wondering:
A light blue hankie with yellow dots in the right pocket means you like to blow Asians. Houndstooth in the left pocket means you like to nibble.
Beautiful Ashbloem of Boston has many loves: Europe, knitting, poetry, politics, and her cat, Gus. But what she loves most of all is hanging out at J.J. Foley’s, drinking beer and playing darts. On Thursday night, when Ashbloem and her friends came in for some fun, they heard some shocking news: Bono was in the bar on Monday night!
BONO. BAH NO. Are you fucking KIDDING ME? Bono was across the STREET FROM ME on MONDAY NIGHT??? Why weren’t we playing darts Monday night? Why? WHY???? Seeing as how we are over there twice a week anyway, would it have KILLED Jerry [the owner] to give us a ring?
Ashbloem tried to drown her sorrows in her beer. BONO — one of her biggest idols. She loved his music. And even their politics were the same. And to make things even worse, Ashbloem could only imagine the amazing blog post she could have written about meeting Bono in her favorite watering hole. Think how jealous her blogger friends would be!
But wait? Isn’t this the internet? Isn’t this the place where no one really knows if you are a man, woman, dog, or person who met Bono? Why not just write a post titled, “This is the post I would have written last Tuesday had we played darts at JJ Foley’s on MONDAY instead of THURSDAY.” Just add some clumsy Photoshop effects and before you know it, you’ve got some doctored photos of you, your friends, and Bono together!
Works for me. I especially enjoyed what happened after the celebrity encounter:
We were so excited by our encounter with celebrity at our local pub that we didn’t want to go home. We all went over to Ann & Dab’s and had a pillow fight in our sexiest lingerie and screamed Bono’s name over and over.
I would have read this post even without Bono.
There is a soap opera component of personal blogs. Every day, readers come to learn more about their favorite blogger, and participate in the ongoing personal saga. Should Joe quit his job? Should Candy go on a second date with that dapper tax attorney?
Blog audiences loved following the real-life online romance between bloggers Will and Maria. Although the two lived far from each other, they found a special bond within the online community.
Readers sighed when they finally ran into each others arms. How romantic!
But then reality set in.
They stopped blogging. Readers were especially shocked when they visited Maria’s blog. They were redirected to another personal blog — that of Will’s wife, the wife of the man who left to be with Maria!
Will’s wife writes both passion and anger:
When originally stumbled across, the story that Maria & Will were presenting in their blogs seemed like a fairytale. A tale of starcrossed lovers, separated by geography and destined to be together.
However, like all fairytales, this story has a dark side, and it comes in the form of the devastated family left behind.
…Ask yourself how you would feel if a family member left a note on the kitchen table and walked out of your life, only for later evidence to reveal that he’d been carrying on a clandestine affair with somebody half a world away.
Is this a case of personal blogging getting a little too real?
NOTE: 7PM (EST) After getting two emails wondering how the wife got the lover’s personal blog to redirect to her own site, I began to wonder about the authenticity of this whole soap opera. Did Maria actually allow the site to be redirected to the wife? Does Blogspot even allow redirection? All of a sudden, like a twist in “All My Children,” the drama even gets more interesting. So, I have donned my Geraldo mustache and am now embarking on my own online investigation into this compelling story: “Soap Opera Post: True or False — Was Blogebrity Fooled?”
NOTE: 10:10PM (EST) A very important blogger informant — let’s just call him “Deep Blogroll” has confirmed that Maria’s site has been “hijacked” by someone close to “Bill” after he moved out to be with Maria. Enough said. Mustache off.
NOTE: THE NEXT MORNING My yahoo email account is busting out of its seams as tipsters send all sorts of info about this Brad and Angelina of the blogging world. You can learn a lot more at Alarming News, Bunniblog, and Joseph’s Space.
Blogging tools like Blogger, Wordpress, and Typepad have made setting up a personal a blog a cinch. But every blogger faces a major question as they start out with their blog: display a photo of himself or not?
It’s no secret that attractive people succeed in business, on TV, even selling books. I know people who will only buy a book if the author on the back cover is a hottie.
What about in blogs? Does the blogger’s hotness help improve traffic? Of course, many bloggers want to remain anonymous to the general public. What’s a hot girl or guy to do?
The solution lies in conveying hotness in a creative way, whether you are a supermodel blogger or not.
I love reading Betty on the Beach. This New York gal writes pieces on relationships and her social life, and enjoys gourmet cooking. But do I honestly read it every day for the content — or for the profile photo, which shows a beautiful nude woman in a completely blurry shot, as if she behind the glass in the shower. You can’t really see anything, but you can imagine. It’s one of my favorite blogs, for obvious reasons.
Grow Some Testicles is another humorous site about dating and relationships, this time written by a quartet of savvy and attractive New York women. Do I know they are attractive? Not really. They don’t even include any photos. But they do include a colorful illustration of four size 0, model-type girls lounging around in a cafe like the “Sex in the City” gals.
Again, I just assume they are very hot.
Retropolitan of the NY-based Tales to Astonish has given some serious thought to this subject:
After seeing an exhaustive number of absolutely infallible clicky internet polls, it’s become apparent that more people visit blogs kept by potentially attractive people. While this defeats the entire appeal of blogging — being appreciated solely for your intelligence and wit — it’s a sad fact of life. (Or a sad fact of blogging, really. Blogging is not life.) Take The Hot Librarian, for instance — nary a photo of her on her blog, and yet the title suggests that she’s hot; as you can imagine, she gets tons of traffic, not all of it for her witty prose. Who cares if some of it’s from skeevy men hovering over dusty monitors in their parents’ dank basement? Traffic is traffic!
His solution:
I’m going to try to drum up more female traffic to Tales to Astonish by publishing some racy photographs of people that I resemble. I won’t post any photos of the real me, just to keep that sliver of mystery that I’ve still got, for what it’s worth. You can use your imagination to combine the faces, and come up with a relative approximation of my foxiness
.
By the way, everyone here at Blogebrity is really, really HOT.
JJ Macmillan is a blogger/novelist/screenwriter from Texas. On his blog, Purgatorian, he runs a popular weekly writing exercise called “Flash Friday” where bloggers have to write a short story starting with a sentence of JJ’s choosing.
JJ is an excellent writer himself. His memory pieces are especially good, weaving tales of his childhood, past jobs, and past relationships.
We chatted via IM:
“Do you think it would be interesting to write about me for Blogebrity?” he asked.
“Uh… not really. Your life is pretty domestic nowadays. Angelina writes about all these cool New York bloggers and her Blogebrity posts are written about in Gawker.”
“But isn’t the quality of the writing the most important thing about a blog?”
I laughed at his naivete.
‘You’re a great writer, JJ, but you’re a regular guy. You don’t go to parties. You’re not a performance artist. You’re just not that interesting as a Blogebrity.”
“Is there something I could do to make myself more interesting?”
“I’m not really sure. You don’t really live on either of the Coasts. Maybe if you did something really dramatic — like KILLED someone, then BLOGGED about it.”
Was I surprised that he actually thought about it? Not really. People will do anything to become a Blogebrity.
There are some days when a blogger just hates blogging. For instance, when blogging “friends” like Justin at dude.man.phat and Meme at Girlspoke are finalists at Gridskipper’s Urban Blogging Awards, and never once mentioned the contest to him. Especially when one of the categories is “World’s Hottest Urban Blogger” and they know that he would easily win.
Maybe it’s blogging envy. This green field of envy spread across Los Angeles last Thursday when the Los Angeles Times Calender section had a front page article on “Blogging L.A.” When they listed their choices of the “jewels” of Los Angeles blogs, you could hear the collective “Where am I?” rising above the Hollywood sign. Women bloggers were especially jealous of Heathervescent’s glamour shot as she blogged on the roof of a downtown office building, the Santa Ana winds racing through her hair.
Some of the choices were just uninspiring: Defamer? Fishbowl LA?
But everyone loves Peggy Archer’s Totally Unauthorized, an excellent blog where this Hollywood lighting technician brilliantly writes about the not-so-glamorous life of the biz working behind the scenes.
Everyone did love her, until now: Another front page Calender article, this time on Sunday, solely about her!
Peggy Archer is, in fact, her nom de blog; for almost a year, her Totally Unauthorized site has offered one of the few truly behind-the-scenes looks at the film and television industry on the Internet. … If you want to know what it’s like to work on a set, there’s no beating Totally Unauthorized. Archer has a clear voice, a good eye for detail and a deadpan delivery.
Who is this Peggy Archer? Two articles in one week? Is she related to someone at the Times? Can she finally get the funding for that independent film to direct?
All this attention is enough to make another LA blogger want to blog on the roof of a downtown office building, and then jump off.
