Art & Perception

Writing parallel blogs is the new big thing. Writing parallel blogs makes you a multi-blogger, a super-blogger, a hyper-blogger.

Parallel blogs are more than a sum of the parts (as a house is more than a collection of bricks). But what should we call the new latent structure?

Arthur Whitman suggested “meta-blog”, which I find good, and “personal blog network”, which I find less good. C. Robin Janning suggested “book”, a bold proposition — it requires modifying the definition of this word.

In bookofjoe we see an alternative solution: combine several parallel blogs into one (with a separate archive file for each day). I can’t quite follow it, but I enjoy what I read.

John Foote writes parallel blogs (mm and mydr2) without using a blog at all.

Auspicious Dragon runs seven blogs in parallel (and confuses the heck out of my RSS reader [well, see the comments]).

Do you write parallel blogs? What are you creating between the lines?

Easy: understand the medium, give key information first, and say something that inspires discussion. To do this, optimize key parts of the blog post. Notice what is missing here: there is no reference to the concept of a diary, or “web log”. Although blog may have its origins in these, the blog is a distinct, interactive type of writing with goals different from a traditional journal. Does a blog post need to have anything to do with a diary entry? If not, why think of a diary when writing your blog post?

. . .

What am I talking about with “understand the medium” of a blog post? Consider first the diary, an empty paper book, perhaps with a lock on it, which probably only you will write in and read. Now compare this to your blog, online, which you want everyone to read — and the smart ones to leave a comment. The difference could not be greater. That’s why I say that thinking of a blog in terms of a diary is a mistake.

A diary has one intended reader: the writer. The writer tends to be a sympathetic audience for his or her own work. The blog has millions of potential readers, almost all of whom will never meet the blogger in person, and, general considerations of humanity aside, would not care too much if the blogger dropped dead the next day.

The blog reader is not a sympathetic audience, in other words. The blog reader has many other blogs to look at. If your blog does not grab them directly, the reader will read somewhere else.

But wait. Blogging is not generally a paying job. We blog in our spare time, mostly. We cannot so easily invest the effort to be concise. Long-windedness is thus a typical feature of blogging. Just look at Ed’s blog.

How do we reconcile these two factors, the fickleness of the reader and the inherently unprofessional character of blog writing?

You could say, just write better. Well, we can try. But let me offer an alternative, an optimization strategy. Let’s look at the key aspects of a blog post:

1) The title. If this doesn’t attract attention, you have a problem. In an RSS newsreader, the human reader may only see your title, initially, among a list of other titles. If your title is not interesting, they will not read further.

2) The first sentence. When scanning blogs, I often drop off reading if the first sentence does tell me something. Nothing personal, it’s just that there are millions of blogs out there . . .

3) The break point. This is place in the blog post where the responsible reader feels they can stop reading, but still leave an intelligent comment. Most blog posts lack the break point. Everything before the break point should be easy to read quickly.

4) The question for the reader. This is where you cue the reader to make a comment, an essential part of successful blogging. The question does not need to be explicitly in the form of a question; it can be a statement designed to provoke response. It seems to me, though, that phrasing the question as a question is polite.

If we focus on these four points and optimize them, then we do not necessarily have to write the rest of the post perfectly. We can’t write the post perfectly — have to take the kids to school, go to work, etc… But optimization of the key points should go a long way in making the post successful, in the sense that people read at least part of it and join in the discussion with comments. Remember, once a reader commits to leaving a comment, or has joined in discussion, they will likely go back and read the post more carefully.

So the key to the perfect blog post is realizing that optimization, not perfection, is the goal.

Is this a reasonable approach to writing online, or only a way to justify lazy, opportunistic writing? Is there a difference?

We need new names, folks. Some of us have multiple blogs. We use blogs as building blocks for sometime larger than a blog. If you use bricks to build a house, then what is it that you build with blogs? We need a name for this thing.

“Site” is not specific enough. You can have a site without any blog components at all.

“Hyper-blog” is lame. Who wants to be a “hyper-blogger”? Ditto “super-blogger”.

Any ideas on names for the structures we are building?

Here are two paintings of pears in which Hanneke van Oosterhout seems to express human personalities.

Look how different are the characters she has painted.

In the first painting, the pears seem innocent, perhaps prudish. In the second painting, the fruit is sensuous and, well, quite the opposite of prudish. In the first painting the pears seem not quite ripe. In the second painting, the surface of the pears shows they are at their sweetest, but will soon be too old.

Both paintings use a bowl to contain the pears. But the tone here is different as are the pears. In the first painting, the blue ceramic, broken and reassembled, has a world-weary character that forms an interesting contrast with the fruit. In the second painting, the bowl serves as a container, but is otherwise more neutral.

The neat folds of the cloth in the second painting are an interesting contrast with the wild disarray of the pears. In the first painting, the tabletop is more stark and hard.

These pictures make one think about what goes on in Hanneke’s mind. “I didn’t paint them like this on purpose!” she insists. I wonder if I believe that.

Today I went across the country to visit Hanneke van den Bergh and her bronze sculptures (the journey only took an hour and a half by train — The Netherlands is a small land.) I saw a lot and learned a lot. I’ll post all about it as soon as I write it up.

A reader mentioned that my RSS feed was not in order. I didn’t even know I had a site feed, but now I have become a dedicated RSS user, for my own site as well as for other people’s. I realize I’ve long been yearning for something like RSS. [Below is an example of Candy Minx’s blog as seen in my newsreader, click image to enlarge]

Some time back we debated the virtue of minimalist site design. What RSS lets readers do is to take the content out of your site and display it in a minimalist context. Every site has a different “look and feel” which the webmaster lovingly crafts. RSS let’s you bypass all of that and get the content in pure form.

Which means, you should read your own blog in an RSS news reader to see how it looks. I got some surprises.

As for the art of web design, site feed suggests that the minimalist approach is best. If readers can bypass your site’s style, then it makes sense to keep flourishes in web design to a minimum, and focus on the content itself.

Or do I have the conclusion backwards?

On the question of how to frame pictures for exhibition, Angela Ferreira commented:

I think the best way to exhibit any painting to appeal to a wide variety of buyers is to display it with a very simple effective frame, or leave the canvas unframed. Framing can be distracting and might not appeal to some — most people like buying a painting and then framing it to their own house style.

Of course, a painting only has to appeal to one buyer — the one who takes it home. In this way, a painting is different from a book or a song. Most people know how challenging it is to frame a picture. If the artist does a good job in choosing a frame, this can save the buyer a lot of effort and decision-making.

The right frame can enhance the value of a painting. But the artist takes a risk in framing, as Angela implies. The time and money invested on the frames may not be well spent.

Should artists consider the frame as an integral part of their work and strive to get it right, whatever the risk or complexity? Or is it better to leave framing to the buyer?

[See the poll at the top of this blog, right column]
[See also post on Photostream]