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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Blogoscopy.
Owls.


Would you like me to describe a charming essay about blogs that just appeared on the New York Times site? Perhaps you'd rather hear about the ... wait... need to find the group term... PARLIAMENT!... of owls that has, the last couple of nights, been hooting like hell in the forest beside our house?

Last week, our neighbor cut down two enormous trees between our houses -- our garden is strewn with woodchips, and, further out on our property, massive logs not yet chipped lie scattered -- and it's my theory that these owls had been living in those trees, and that now they're a bit adrift. In any case, at around nine o'clock in the evening they begin a back and forth of hoots, most of them a litany, but some rising to real anxiety.

Everyone in the house gets very quiet when they start. If it's warm enough, I stick my head outside. The woodchips glimmer in the dark. The owls are very close, as close as the foxes and deer that also live on our hill, and their sound is harsh and intimate, roiled with emotion...

It's bizarre, the wildlife here. I'm not complaining.

The blog thing is by a NYT reporter who likes blogging almost too much -- it brings him much closer to his readers, he notes (he checks his comment thread compulsively), and he finds that he cares a great deal about some of them. The blog is marvelously time-consuming:

Sometimes I wonder whether I care to the point that I neglect other things, like, oh, my job. Tweaking the blog is seductive in a way that a print deadline never is. By the time I am done posting entries, moderating comments and making links, my, has the time flown. I probably should have made some phone calls about next week’s column, but maybe I’ll write about, ah, blogging instead.


He compares blogging to traditional journalism:

There has always been a feedback loop in journalism — letters to the editor, the phone and more recently e-mail messages. But a blog provides feedback through a fire hose. The nice thing about putting out a newspaper was that, at some point, the story was set and the writer got to go home. Now I have become a day trader, jacked in to my computer and trading by the second in my most precious commodity: me. How do they like me now? What about ... now? Hmmmm ... Now?