Writer's Block 


Writer's Block

The photograph is of a clay sculpture done by North Carolina artist Charlene Bregier entitled “Writer's Block.” I found her Web site through an image search: writer's block, and I'm glad I did. Her sculptures are beautiful. I like the bronzes, in particular a commissioned piece John 8.

I haven't posted lately. I've done my usual collecting of links that to write about, and part of the block may simply be that list is rather long. But I've also been mulling things over.

I've always thought of the blog as a kind of experiment. I can imagine many ways blogs can be helpfully used, and in my imagination that generally means: how others might use them. Still, I was quite curious about some of the details of making blogs and was eager to involve my local circle of friends in collaboration with my Ugandan friends, particularly Nathan and his BSLA community organization. To the extent that the blog's purpose was to raise money for a computer for Nathan, that goal has been fulfilled.

I sent the money and Nathan will purchase one there. I very much appreciate all the good advice people have offered about this matter. Like so many decisions to be made, there are good arguments to be made for different approaches. So often it's the case too that a single solution doesn't stand out as being the best and a judgment-call must be made. I'm quite happy to put the ball firmly in Nathan's court and am confident things will work out very well. Thank you all.

So now what? By far the most common feedback about my blog follows: “It'd be really good if you didn't write so much.” The second most common follows: “It'd be really good with more care and preparation.” That's easier said than done, unfortunately.

Dave Winer said something really interesting about making money with Internet media:

The way to make money on the Internet is to send them away. Google proved this, in the age of portals that were trying to suck the eyeballs in and not let them go, Google took over by sending you off more efficiently than anyone else.

I'm not trying to make money here and yet the observation about the way to keep attention is to send people away seems to apply to many of my favorite blogs. One of my favorite things about doing the blog is discovering people and content I wouldn't have otherwise. Other bloggers have sent me along some memorable journeys.

Hypertext is amazing, and I knew that long before I ever got a computer. What I discover is that it's harder to write embedding hypertext links than I ever knew. The blog is a one way to climb the steep learning curve.

My numerous spelling errors are something else I've gotten feedback about, so I'm writing this post in my word processing software. I've been writing directly in the Blogger software online partly so that I can bring up the pages I wish to link to. I went through my saved links to see if I'd saved a post by Digby which contained one of the most facile examples of using hypertext I'd seen recently. Darn it, I hadn't saved it, so of course I online again.

Digby spotted a comment to a post at Unclaimed Territory a blog by attorney Glenn Greenwald. The comments by Poputonian brilliantly make a case against the Bush administration and reference a comparisson to the Nixon administration by linking, point by point, to Herblock political cartoons of the era.

Ha,ha. So many words just to fit that link in. I need an editor, but that's not part of the Blogger package. Maybe I'll learn, then again maybe I'll never learn. That seems very much a part of what blogs are about. Certainly all of the helpful criticism about my attempts doesn't fall on deaf ears. However, at this point, all I can seem to muster is to keep plodding along. And that's what I intend to do.