Playing across the river

Here’s a meme of sorts, for anyone who’s interested.

1. Which blogs did you read regularly when you first started blogging?

The first blog I read regularly was Tom Watson‘s, of all things. It was the run-up to the 2005 election and I was one of the people pushing (at least within blogworld) for anti-Labour tactical voting; Tom Watson is a pretty good blogger for an MP, and – being a Labour MP – took a fairly straight-up-and-down “vote Labour to stop the Tories” line, which was fun to argue with. I started my own blog when my comments started getting too long, and started leaving comments and links on a bunch of related blogs – Blood and Treasure, Chicken Yoghurt, Europhobia, the Yorkshire Ranter, the Jarndyce Blog (defunct).

2. Which blogs do you read regularly now?

These days, on the other hand, my main hangouts are Aaronovitch Watch, Splintered Sunrise, CT and Daniel’s blog, although I do still read the Ranter and B&T. (Edit: since I began this post I’ve had to give up on Splintered, or at least start reading with a very long spoon. The comments threads there, in particular, have changed overnight from a thoroughly congenial environment to, well, something else.)

3. Which blogs have you stopped reading, and why?

I’ve tried to find some kind of political trajectory in the blogs I’ve spent a lot of time on over the years – Tom Watson to Gauche to Dave to Socialist Unity to AaroWatch, what’s that, right to left? Labour loyalist to not actually anti-Labour as such? anti-Trot to, er, slightly less anti-Trot? The fact that three of my favourite political blogs – Liam, Splinty (when he’s on form) and Cedar Lounge – write about Ireland may also be significant, or it may just be that I like the way they write.

Another couple of categories of blog I’ve stopped following are easier to identify. I used to run two separate blogs, one of them devoted to what was then work-related stuff; this was in what retrospectively looks like an odd period in my career, when I was heavily into ethnoclassification (a.k.a. ‘folksonomy’), the Semantic Web, ontology modelling and so forth. (A philosopher friend remarked that the entire ‘ontology’ project was doomed to confusion the moment they adopted that term – ‘ontology’ in this context signifies a logically-structured and locally complete set of inter-related terms, the mental universe of a particular discipline or application. An epistemology, in other words.)

Anyway, I spent quite a while looking for pointers on this brave new world of software-enabled social networking, while also looking for stuff to write about on my work blog and looking for something to read in between working. At one point I started writing a series of posts debunking the then-fashionable image of the “Long Tail”, and was at once downcast and relieved to discover that Tom Slee had done it all already. (Tom’s a fine blogger and I strongly recommend his book.) Nick Carr gave me several “oasis in the desert of hype” moments; he also gave me personally some useful advice when I was looking for writing work, for which much thanks. I used to read Dave Rogers with more attention than he solicited; he oscillated unpredictably between LiveJournal-ish chat, testy common sense and flashes of real wisdom. I discovered Maciej Ceglowski’s Idle Words by way of his “Dabblers and Blowhards” essay taking down a writer called Paul Graham, which is (a) much more widely applicable and (b) hilarious. (It occurs to me that a lot of my favourite bloggers from this period were (or are) essentially anti-boosters; people who react to the latest from Clay Shirky or Chris Anderson or Dave Sifry with varying proportions of scepticism, irritation and laughter. On Clay specifically, this from Tom is brilliant.)

At some point I noticed that most of my work blog feed was American (or Canadian), while almost all my home blogs were British (or Irish); at a later and less definite point I more or less decided to make a policy of this. So when I stopped reading blogs (from the world of software-enabled social networking) at work, none of the transatlantic blogs I’d been reading made it onto my feed at home (even if they weren’t all about s.-e. s. n.) It was an arbitrary decision, only really justified by the fact that my home feed was quite long enough as it was. I sometimes miss reading these blogs regularly, & sometimes check back on them. The blog from this period I look back on with most fondness is Shelley Powers’s Burningbird, which is currently running as five or six separate blogs but at that stage was all in one place. I can understand the decision to split it up – as a single blog it must have been taxing and challenging on quite a personal level – but from my selfish perspective as a reader I miss the single BB; it combined green politics, software development, feminism, the Semantic Web, personal experience and photography in some extraordinarily rich and powerful ways.

The other main category of blogs I’ve stopped reading consists of blogs that have stopped appearing. Short of dropping off the Web altogether, like the Jarndyce Blog, it’s not always clear when a blog has gone silent for good; I guess in practice it’s partly a matter of how long different readers are prepared to wait for the next post. Martyn Connell’s beer blog Zythophile went quiet for half of last year before coming to life again – I unsubbed at the time and had a six-month backlog by the time I caught on. I’m keeping Rob on the list for now, despite his silence for most of this year, in the hope that he’s also just resting; as far as I can see there’s nobody else doing what he used to do with that blog (viz. blogging a Marxist engagement with the legal form). By contrast, both Ellis and Justin put a fairly definite full stop to their blogs (although Ellis went on to do something not quite completely different). They’re both fine writers and these were both great blogs, which made me feel there were people out there doing the kind of thing I wanted to do with a blog. Saying any more than that seems both pointless and impertinent.

4. What blog did you start reading most recently?

My most recent addition to the RSS feed list is Jon Boden’s A Folk Song A Day, which does more or less what it says on the tin and does it rather well. But that isn’t really a blog so much as a project exploiting blog software. My latest blog discovery is Luke Roelofs’ superb (and exhaustingly prolific) Majestic Equality. Despite its title – taken from that Anatole France quote about the law – Luke’s blog is not devoted to a Marxist engagement with the legal form (although I wouldn’t be surprised if he gave it a go). What Luke does is to argue from first principles, taking a standpoint informed by Marx and Spinoza, and tackling questions like these:

What is meant in calling a prediction of the future, or a political theory making such predictions, ‘utopian’?

what goes on in someone’s mind when they help someone else with something?

is a human society possible, in which individuals will, except in very exceptional circumstances, be able to act without violating any genuine value, given sufficient wisdom?

It’s a bit like what Stumbling and Mumbling might look like if the more challenging arguments were followed through instead of grinding to a halt in a sputter of rhetorical questions – and it were written by a Canadian anarchist instead of a writer on the Investors’ Chronicle. Strongly recommended. For a taster, try these three posts on the deceptively intuitive concept of “violence”.

5. List every blog you’ve ever contributed to.

Actually Existing. I started blogging in March 2005, as a spinoff from the arguments on Tom Watson’s blog; my first post (digging out some material from 1997 which I hadn’t known what to do with) was rapidly followed by this bit of navel-gazing and this post, which before it was chewed up by Blogger was quite a decent bit of psephology. Another nine “how should we vote” posts followed, all concluding that we shouldn’t vote Labour. In the circumstances I don’t think that was wrong.

Apparently… (later Cloud Street). My work blog, set up later in March 2005. “I’ve started this blog as a place to collect my thoughts on user-centred ontologies, ethnoclassification, folksonomies, emergent semantics and so on.” They can’t touch you for it. First post: a reply to a comment on a blog post by Clay Shirky, taking a sceptical view of the claims then being made for Wikipedia.

What I wrote. A short-lived attempt to use Blogger to showcase (or park) some offline writing which I thought could use a wider audience. All three of these were merged into The Gaping Silence in March 2007, or November 2006 if you believe What I wrote.

Then there was the 2005 UK Election Roundup group blog (which no longer exists) and its larger, shinier, more ambitious but ultimately less coherent successor, The Sharpener (link goes to a list of all my posts). The Sharpener started well, with a bunch of us between us publishing at least one good post every day, but ultimately foundered because none of us were really sure what its identity was. I think in retrospect we should have been able to work “not Left but not anti-Left” into a USP – it would certainly be unique – but we couldn’t even agree on that much. The alternative was simply to be the politics blog that was open to everyone who wanted to write on a politics blog that was open to everyone who wanted, etc, but that wasn’t enough in the end to keep regulars motivated or stop occasional contributors from drifting away. The new Sharpener? LibCon for dedication, Fistful for variety, AaroWatch for attitude.

But my first blog, or blog-like thing, dates from 2003. On May 28 I put up the first two instalments of

A life in theatreland, clubland, Hollywoodland and the Land of Green Ginger: the memoirs of Sir Frederick Bodine.

and waited for the plaudits to start rolling in, if that’s what plaudits do. Oh well. The title of the blog was Remembering July Garland. An introductory post explained all:

“Ditch the rainbow song!”

The words were mine, all those many years ago; those sad, misguided words were mine. Fortunately for all concerned, my advice was ignored, as it would be so often in the future. But that’s another story for another day.

Of course, dear Judy didn’t ditch ‘the rainbow song’; indeed, it would be associated with her name for many years to come. It affords me a crumb of solace to note that the song was heavily edited before recording, eliminating most if not all of the elements to which I had objected. Even the title had to change – “Have yourself a merry little rainbow”, what sense does that make? None! None, I say!

These, then, are my memories of a life in the green room; a life which I can truly say has been lived among the stars; a life that’s full, in which I’ve travelled each and every byway. But more, much more than this.

I tried to place Sir Frederick’s memoirs with some of the top publishing houses, but sadly without success. (To be precise, I ran them past someone at Word (who said “very nice, but no thanks”) and someone at Mojo (who said “not really us, try Word“).) My dreams of finding fame and fortune as the Bodine amanuensis were dashed. But it was fun while it lasted.

Perhaps it was the drink talking, but at one point I asked old Morrie what had gone wrong – why wasn’t he the big star he used to be? He wasn’t best pleased, I can tell you. He glared at me, brandished an old Smiths 12″ and said, with great aplomb, “Sir Frederick, I’m still big – it’s just the records that have got small.”

I apologised, of course, and Morrie was soon his old charming self again. Apparently the restricted dimensions of CD packaging are a genuine concern for him.

Another couple of blogs need mentioning for the sake of completeness, although my song lyrics blog isn’t one of them (it’s invitation-only, and besides I haven’t updated it for ages.)

Oh Good Ale. At the beginning of 2008 I started keeping beer tasting notes in this post. My notes on beer rapidly outgrew the post and turned into a static page, and subsequently into their own dedicated blog. I‘m planning to turn have just turned the “tasting notes” posts back into static pages, after which I’ll and I may now start writing the occasional post and turn it into a real blog.

¡Vivan Las Caenas! This doesn’t really qualify as a blog I’ve contributed to, as there’s absolutely nothing there; I snagged the WordPress domain name late one night, not realising that I wouldn’t be able to unsnag it. The plan is to spruce it up a bit and put longer, retrospective posts up there – “My life as a military historian”, that kind of thing; either that or an issue-by-issue overview of my involvement with Red Pepper. Or both. The reference is to the revolutionary(?) slogan shouted at the beginning and end of my favourite film – and, indirectly, to the materialist idea that our lives are built in and through circumstances we didn’t create, and have been since before we started thinking about it. Structure determines agency, and agency would be pretty empty if it didn’t. Of course, at the moment it’s all I can do to post here occasionally and keep Oh Good Ale updated, so whether anything will ever appear on ¡VLC! is something of a moot point.

So there you go. Here are the questions again:
Tell us about…

1. the blogs you read regularly when you started blogging
2. the blogs you read regularly now
3. some blogs you’ve stopped reading (and why)
4. the blog you’ve started reading most recently
5. every blog you’ve ever contributed to

Have at it!