Odds and Ends

I'm really way too tired to be sitting here typing anything. It's been a rough 36 hours, but hey, it's all good. I can now finally eat the dinner I set to defrost yesterday evening... :-)

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Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about blogs and livejournals and the culture that they spawn. When I started blogging, I didn't know anyone else who had a blog. Now I know lots of people. I've linked to some people, people link to me- and randomly, people find significance in something I wrote and link to that. And I do a lot of linking back when I find someone who has managed to put into words exactly what I've been thinking - and then I'm completely in awe that those people are just so in-tune, sooo... well, coherent.

Blogs and livejournals get you to know a person better. We're ficsters, so of course we want to know how other ficsters think and what their modus operendi is. It's really voyeuristic in some ways - popping in and out of people's journals and unless you leave a comment, for the most part they don't know that you've ever been there. But I wonder if it's too much. In addition to all the other fannish work we do, throw the updating of the blog onto the pile, not to mention the endless loop of meta-discussions as one blog links into the other and if you miss one day of reading, all of a sudden you're out of the fanfic loop. And on that same note, is it necessary to have a blog if you have even the slightest intention of being a BNF? I don't know that many Trekkers who have blogs - with the exception of those listed in my links - but I've noticed that other fandoms like Smallville, X-Men, BtVS - blogs abound. Anyone who is someone has a blog. And yeah - blogs drive traffic. Is there anyone here who gets more hits on a page that isn't their blog?

But at the same time, it's fun to have a public soapbox to stand up on and just generally broadcast to the world. But when is enough enough? There's been talk that the blog culture is sucking life away from mailing lists. Discussions and reviews re the latest shows make it into the blogs now. WIPs are posted in this space, not to mention the occasional tempest in a teacup brewed. About those WIPs - could those be considered 'pre-posting' publicity jaunts? You know - throwing out a crumb for the readers?

But on a positive note, thanks to the blog, I 'found' Bishclone again - aka Kat Hughes to VOY folks - who was an absolute sweetie in beta'ing my first VOY story, Grief, and today, she cheered me up greatly in her diary. Lovely girl, that Kat. And a fabulous writer. So, if you haven't read her stuff, what are you waiting for?

In a way, blogworld is incredibly small and occasionally claustraphobic - you see how people know each other by the number of links running down the side of the blog - author's notes are no longer enough to figure out who the BNFs in fandom are. The cynic in me has to wonder about the journals with 80 million other journals linked - are those actually a daily read? A once in a while read? Or is there some kind of measure - that when you reach a certain number of reciprocal links you've "made it" as a blogger? Seriously - can you measure an author's popularity by their blogs? And how much of that fic popularity is transcended into the blogs - ie is a witty journalist the same as the writer in a particular fandom? Because in the daily blog rounds, it's obvious who the "in crowd" is - and I wonder how much our mutual public gushing contributes to that. Or doesn't contribute, ie does familiarity breed contempt?

Gak. There's that "making it" discussion again. Dinner. Good. Can't think about that right now.

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On another note, what was McDonald's thinking when they decided to bring the Spice Girls back for their newest ad campaign?