My blogging pace

My year by year stats are a bit revealing aren't they?

2004 - I started in Sept and I managed 47 posts
2005 - hitting my stride, I manage 762 posts in my first full year
2006 - keeping up the pace, I squeeze out a ridiculous 824 posts
2007 - then it pretty much halves, offering up just 478 posts
2008 - and with only around another month of blogging to go, this year is halved again to a pathetic 217 posts so far

Someone tell me that its quality that quantity that counts?!

Norm speaks the truth on online friends

Norm is a wise man on many topics, not least in this brief but astute comment about online/real-life friendships:

[what about:] how you can make friends on the internet with people you otherwise would not have met; how you can then consolidate and extend these friendships offline; how, even if you don't (because of distance, say), having electronic friends can be a rewarding experience in itself; how old (real-world) friends who live far apart can now be in touch with one another with much greater facility and regularity than formerly; how, the internet being (when all is said and done) part of the real world, friends can also cease to be friends because of what happens there; and how anyone whose friendships are wholly confined to the internet probably has problems aside from an addiction to their computer.

Of course you do have to factor in that he was taking Roger Scruton to task for pointing out that online friendships differ to real-life ones in somewhat simplistic terms (finding fault with Scruton: fish, barrel). Even so Norm offers some wise distinctions and complications of the argument.

I'd certainly back up most, if not all, of these:
1) I've made friends with people all over the world whom I almost certainly would never have gotten chance to meet otherwise;

2) through blogmeets and just general encounters (especially with local bloggers) I've gotten to know some smashing people;

3) some of the people I know online I only know online - but through blogs, forums, emails and chats I can exchange thoughts and views on a whole range of life, the universe and everything topics;

4) the same works too for some of my more distant real-life friends -- without the internet I doubt I would have been able to sustain contact with Rita or Chrissie even though I do speak to each by phone (and yes, Chrissie, I know we keep talking about Skype!);

5) I've certainly made and subsequently lost friends through online contact - there is something raw in words on the page, written with an immediacy that may remove tone and gesture - but that isn't to say that I haven't screwed up real-life friendships too;

6) and I would (broadly) concur that to only have online friends may be indicative of bigger issues (with the proviso that for some, perhaps those unable to interact as easily with the physical/real-world through disability for example, an online life may be far more productive as a source of friendship. Arguably, that too is suggestive of bigger issues, though not necessarily 'problems' as Norm phrases this).

How do you feel about your online/real-life friendships and their similaries and differences? Is it different if you're on Facebook, rather than writing blogs?

A-Z of blogs

Stolen shamelessly from EineKleineRob.

Autocomplete blog meme. Simple procedure: type each letter of the alphabet in the address bar (one at a time, obviously) and see which blog comes up first. The result should be a map of your personal blogosphere, or at least those bits of it you’ve visited recently.

This version echoes a bit of Phil (excluding letters where nothing came up) and a bit of Rob (I wasn't particular about excluding those sites only visited a few times, since I too may revisit on such whimsical information).

Apologies to those who maybe came alphabetically a little below the first appearing blog for each letter. Or for those where my history has cleared out identifying them.

A - 'Theatre is Life, Film is Art, TV is Furniture' [Anna Waits]
B - Behind the Sofa [The Doctor Who multi-authored blog]
C - Cloud in Trousers [thank goodness! Neil might never forgive me otherwise!]
D - From Despair to Where? [as the subtitle says 'Stuart and Dave's communist blog]
E - Eine Kleine Nichtmusik [EineKleineRob of course!]
F - Feeling Listless
G - The Gaping Silence [Phil, from whence the meme came...]
I - Indigenous Stranger [James Diggs]
J - Joe in Vegas [Joe, funnily, in Vegas]
M - Music is Our Hot Hot Sex [collective blog]
O - Informationally Overloaded [at onemanblogs - Gordon McLean]
P - You Don't Think You're Taking This Too Seriously...? [persiflage_1 at livejournal for all your Doctor Who thoughts and especially Doctor/Martha fan-fic needs]
R - Rullsenberg Rules [no idea who she is...]
S - Stu_N [unsurprisingly, Stu N...]
T - The Big Blowdown [Reidski]
W - The Woman Who Talked Too Much [Marie - our successful author]
Z - All About My Movies [Emma]