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I'm better now. Thanks to all who've suggested I get a grip: I apologize for the vehemence of my initial reaction, which was, as I said, an instantaneous, gut thing—I was aware even as I was typing it that I was parting company with reason along the way.
But let me say outright, Tom, that we get very different things out of weblogging. I (and, I suspect, others in the Collective) could not care less about "functionality," nor about changing the template, nor about (as per Tannhauser's tongue-in-cheek suggestion) winning awards. I am not a designer, not a hobbyist: I'm a writer, and I enjoyed having an outlet. My blog was my broadside, a place to put essays, links, and photographs; blogging qua blogging, showing off redesigns, getting comments, being a part of "the blogging community"—these things interest me neither a jot nor a tittle.
I'm still disappointed, though. What really slaughters me about the whole thing is what a wasted opportunity it's been. The zine and the Collective were supposed to be the foundations for a real community, organized around the message board.
So yeah, my Collective blog was a purely functional vehicle for expression, and yeah, I could do that just as well at Blogspot or elsewhere. But y'know what? I'm not likely to do so. The reason I started blogging at all (despite, as you recall, some initial misgivings) was all about community-building.
The implication when this all started was that, in hosting the blogs on Barbelith, they were not simply blogs by Barbelith members (like plasticbag, or Venusberg, et cetera), but an integral part of the Barbelith experience itself: both in and of Barbelith. The promise of the idea was that the blogs would act almost as columns in a magazine or newspaper, providing updated content on a near-daily basis while the zine itself was updated weekly.
The mix of posters invited to participate seemed (whether this was Tom's intent or not) to be chosen to for the express purpose of varying perspectives. Activism, showbiz, university life, gender issues, surrealism, romance, journalism, fashion, music, therapy, magick, art, faith, family—even listed in this horribly reductionist form, it sounds like a recipe for a great cocktail, a bracing mix of voices and concerns, a kaleidoscopic world-view.
But the fragmentation began almost immediately, with technical glitches and storming off in huffs and Bartleby-esque refusals to participate, and so the project seemed stillborn. The blogs were never integrated into the zine or the message boards in any meaningful way. It was ambitious, but we were operating without a model.
But I'm seeing the idea in practice elsewhere, notably at Opi8. They're generating healthy traffic at their message board with a set of blog-style journals (the "Transmit" section), each updated once or twice a week. Each blogger/columnist keeps fairly tightly to a particular brief—Japanese culture, film criticism, practical magick, work journals from the film industry, theater, fiction writing, and the visual arts.
It's not a perfect model—ideally the blogs would be integrated better into the zine itself, and the board would be more a community centered around the zine, and less an advertisement for it—but it sort of works. In part that's because it's attached to an entity, (Opi8 magazine itself) that is both content-rich and regularly-updated, and in part because each blog has a clear agenda: you know why it's there, and you know why you're reading it.
This could have worked (and perhaps still could) on Barbelith. But changes would need to be made to make the Collective blogs an asset, a draw, rather than a useless liability:
Purpose: Each blogger should define a "beat," come up with a brief mission statement: This is a journal of my struggle for success as a one-legged ballerina. or This is my first year in the military and what I thought of it. Whatever. Not as restrictive a mandate as "film reviews" or "magickal record," but something that helps the reader get a handle on the blog.
Information: A header giving some biographical information (true or made-up, it hardly matters), the aforementioned mission statement, and perhaps an image—something to make it plain that these blogs are attached the Barbelith for a purpose, not just because they're The Popular Kids. Integrate it right into each blog's template.
Integration: shedloads of cross-linkage: from the Collective page to each of the others, from each to each, from the front page of the zine to each.
Exposure: related to the above, really: remember the "Today on the Barbelith Underground" box that used to run on plasticbag—and on the front of the zine, too, if I'm not mistaken? Have something like that, again on the front page of the zine, featuring a selected pull-quote from one or more of the blogs, with appropriate link. Bring back the one for the Underground, too—have "Today's Featured Topics" alongside "Today's Featured Blogs." Integration; that's the key.
Day late and a dollar short, I know. And it's your project, not mine.
Maybe I should just shut up, be grateful for the chance I've had, and fuck off to start my own zine—as has been my suggestion to others. |
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