First up, if you are into tags looks like in the top 100 on technorati weblog or weblogs is used more than blogs or blogging. So, maybe I might think about renaming the category for blogging to weblog here on this blog. All part of thinking about what is going on out there with the way tags are generated and how this form of taxonomy is cultivated.

But, what this post is really about is me stalling on how to pitch this new blog. I have momentary writers block as I ponder what and how I would like to write on what will hopefully be an ongoing blog (that doesn’t keep moving for a bit.) And of course the best way to kill writers block is to start writing.

So, what is happening here? Well a few influences are creeping in as my hands are poised over the keyboard. Funnily enough, one of them is about writing more vane, banal crap that adds to the information overload on the web. A recent essay on blogging by Geert Lovink titled ‘Blogging, the nihilist impulse’ provides a critique on the blogging phenomenon, with a particular focus on the potential that blogging has as an independent form of media. And this is where the writing slows down and my point is illustrated in the practice. Right now I am working super-fast to incapsulate what is a complex argument. I have read this article a few times, but in what I call true blogging fashion, I am skimming looking for a quick way to summarise to suit my needs in what should be typically a blog post that doesn’t ideally turn into a book. The other typical way of doing that is grabbing a quote out like this:

Blogging is neither a project nor a proposal but a condition whose existence one must recognize. “We blog,” as Kline and Bernstein say. It’s today’s a priori. Australian cultural theorist Justin Clemens explains: “Nihilism is not just another epoch amongst a succession of others: it is the finally accomplished form of a disaster that happened a long time ago.”[22] To translate this into new-media terms: blogs are witnessing and documenting the diminishing power of mainstream media, but they have consciously not replaced its ideology with an alternative. Users are tired of top-down communication – and yet have nowhere else to go. “There is no other world” could be read as a response to the anti-globalization slogan, “Another world is possible”.

That gets the point across without me working hard on the paraphrase and leaves it at that, time to move onto the next post. And, this is where the title for this post begins to change as I begin to realise what the focus on this post might be about. Yes, questioning and finding an alternative approach, somewhere I haven’t already been or maybe what you call reflecting on what has gone before. Looking up the screen the length of this post is catching up on me it is time to close and think about another post as a way to capture other aspects of what I am looking for here. A good place to start would be my own critique of the article referred to above. Perhaps, this critique in itself may be part of the other ‘world’ that Lovink is referring to?