Elf Sternberg

In all of the on-line guides to "improve your blogging and increase your audience," there is the "list of kinds of blog entries." This list says that there are X kinds of entries, and using them will help drive traffic to your site: The Leading Question, The Scare Tactic, The "I will make your rich/sexy/healthy" Entry, The How-To, and finally The List.

Yes, the list recommends itself.

And normally, I like lists. Since I do web development and design, lists are good for me: "15 sexy footers," "10 trends in graphic design for 2009," "12 javascript techniques every developer should know," "6 CMS frameworks that real web developers use."

You know what lists I hate? There are two kinds:

"3000 Fonts Every Designer Should Own!"

Okay, that's just obviously stupid. A designer should have a stable of maybe 300 fonts he or she really likes, and suitcases of styles for specific genres, but 3000 fonts is more than anyone can be asked to carry around in his or her head. There's no point to that kind of list: either we already have the font sets we enjoy, or we don't have time to filter through 3000 fonts to pick out ones we need for any immanent projects.

But even more blazingly stupid, in a similar way, is this one:

"95 resources to make you more efficient and productive!"

That's the height of ridiculous: reading 95 separate articles just to find the three or four techniques that might appeal to you to make you more productive is a waste of your productive hours. A thoughtful blogger would have pared this down to "Four techniques for maintaining your productive day," and under each technique, "Three tools for maintaining this technique," with commentary for each. A blind list, especially of 95 different articles, tells me that the writer probably hasn't read them all and is just trying to drive traffic.

I can consume 10 to 20 graphical examples, and when it comes to development techniques a well-written headline will help me filter through 15 or so to find the two I don't know yet. But lists are supposed to help reader acheive some goal, and these super-long, super-fat lists without descriptions or guidance from the writer are just a waste of time.

Professor PZ Meyers of Pharyngula fame, was in Seattle last night and attended Drinking Liberally, the left's attempt at a free-wheeling, open discussion where alcohol is consumed and Scooter Libby is griped about.

The Seattle branch of DL seems to consist of four factions: old political hands who haven't adopted new media, who sit around at a table and gripe about all the new technology that's making their lives more confusing; political campaigners looking for fresh bodies and contributions to their various causes, who move from table to table; political bloggers who sit around at another table with their laptops open discussing ways of making political blogging more effective, and finally political blog readers who form a penumbra around that table and pick up its emanations.

(The thing I've always found remarkable about the liberal vs. conservative thing is that conservatives, in my experience, read more and think more deeply than liberals, but because of their discipline they tend to be think along narrow channels and are frequently wrong about the problem they address; on the other hand, liberals by dint of their inherent messiness tend to have a better picture of the problem and will come up with better short-term solutions, but those solutions will inevitably have to be revisited in the future precisely because they're short-term.)

PZ Meyers created a new table: the Science bloggers (and his fans). I was the token "science fiction" blogger. The conversation was long and typically free-wheeling; we did a lot of griping about the fact that the Discovery Institute was just about a mile away, and wondered if we could entice Casey Luskin or Jonathan Wells, or any of their cronies to come on doubt. They'd probably be afraid that PZ was ten feet tall and breathed fire. There was a lot of conversation about science blogging in general, and whether or not the "conservative" science blog, Scientific Blogging, was in any way a threat to Seed's Science Blogs, which was somehow perceived as being "too liberal," apparently because there are non-Christians blogging there. (The "conservative" site is remarkable mostly because it really does have to swallow its pride and admit, yeah, no science actually comes out of the DI, and all of the biology done today relies on evolutionary theory.)

PZ is a suprisingly calm guy (I'm pretty sure that's Coke he's guzzling there), although he can get animated when talking about the frustrations he feels with the encroaching alternative reality of the DI and like institutions. His daughter, Skatje, who will probably never live down the "Oh, the Huge Manatee" post she made last year, is the young woman hiding behind the dark "no paparazzi" glasses. She kept peeking over them.

Anyway, it was a pleasure to meet him and the other Seattle-based science bloggers and their fans.

Well, it looks like there's another blogquake going on. Six Apart's crack legal team has succumbed to vigilante pressure from the outside world and is now tracking down every LJ in which the user has one of the following (or a synonym for one of the following) in the "Interests" list: child abuse, human sacrifice, kidnapping, killing, murder, paedophiles, paedophilia, rape, and beating people up.

I doubt they're going to come for me; none of those particularly float my boat. But it does mean that Six Apart is now taking an active, editorial interest in what you write, which is different from LJAbuse's previous interest only in what you do. Six Apart's abuse policy has now become editorial: your blog is no longer your own, but is now jointly managed by you and the legal team of Six Apart, which may decide without warning to terminate your account.

The thing that irritates me most is that they're going after fiction writers. Despite the disclaimer from LJ abuse that they're not going after fictional accounts, it's become clear from the ongoing discussion that some user accounts have disappeared because they were the fictional journals of fictional, villainous characters.

Sigh. The only question is: when will the Six Apart legal team get its act together and start going after all "questionable" content? I mean, I have "sadomasochism" as an interest (no, really!?) and that's illegal in Massachusetts.

If LJ becomes a Disney Gated Community, I'm so outta here, whether they push me or not.