Category: Blogs and Blogging

It’s blog carnival time! Hie thee over to Arboreality for Festival of the Trees 6 — Taking Root and Bearing Fruit, an exceptionally generous and well-organized link-fest. Take work off early if you have to.

I thought I’d get into the spirit of things with the above shot of an oak apple gall, made by — get this — an oak apple gall wasp. Last May, the parent wasp hijacked an oak leaf (still attached) and made it grow a brood chamber for her larvae, which eventually burst out, Alien-like, through the little holes at the front. Either that, or the holes were made by some predator going in. In any case, I was disappointed to see that my favorite invertebrate carnival, Circus of the Spineless, has been postponed for another week.

However, in scanning the list of just-published blog carnivals at BlogCarnival.com, I was very pleased to discover a scholarly section of the blogosphere I had no idea about represented at the Biblical Studies Carnival. If you’re as turned on as I am by topics such as “When did Yahweh and El merge?”, “Were the Galatians already circumcised?” (a seven-part series!) and “Going Potty in Ancient Times,” then please join me in checking out this carnival. If you’re after lighter fare, though, perhaps the Carnival of Satire will be more to your liking.

If you’re a bird-lover, you probably already know about I and the Bird, but if you don’t, the latest edition (#37) offers an excellent introduction to one of the original inspirations for the Festival of the Trees.

By the way, if you’d like to help spread the word about the Festival of the Trees with a colorful badge in your sidebar, just like the one I have —

or with a more minimalistic “antipixel” button —

we have the code available for copying and pasting at the coordinating blog’s new Promote page.

UPDATE (3:00 p.m.): I’ve just finished reading all the posts in the Festival. I learned about a form of meditation in which people try and imitate trees; trees wrapped entirely in straw for the winter; fungi that kill animals and share the spoils with their tree partners; the amazing xylothek; a tree so toxic that the smoke from its burning wood can kill people who inhale it; and medlars that must be bletted. If you want the links, you know where to go.

Qarrtsiluni, the literary blogzine I help out with as managing editor, is seeking submissions for its current theme, First Time. As the guest editors explain,

There’s a first time for everything. The obvious: first kiss, first love, first sex. The first day of school. Less obvious: first time around the block, first poem, first loss, first Christmas you remember. This first time for everything theme is wide open, so we don’t want to limit you with our suggestions. Surprise us!

We are looking for memoir and essay, for poetry, fiction, photography, artwork. For a form that perhaps we’d be seeing for the very first time.

This edition will run through the end of December, but submissions must be in by December 15, and should be no longer than 3,000 words. For additional guidelines, see here.

Image courtesy RedKid.net.

On Friday afternoon, I lay down for a brief nap shortly after reading a post about blog linking and commenting etiquette at Simply Wait. I dreamed that I was blogging a response to it. It was kind of a self-reflexive dream, because the basic point of my post was that, while blog links are important to me, I’m really more concerned about linking to my dreams. And I included three quotes from recent dreams, each with a hyperlink back to the dream.

This point seemed so reasonable that I woke up fully intending to write the post for real. It was only when I sat down at my writing table that I remembered that my dream world was not, in fact, accessible via the Internet.

It kind of seems like it should be, though. It’s the original virtual reality, after all, millions of years older than the Internet. I can’t believe that I still have to wait until after I wake up to blog my dreams — that’s, like, totally Amish! After all, we can blog from pretty much anywhere else; Anousheh Ansari even intends to blog from space, according to the BBC.

I have lots of ideas of ways to improve blogging and online social networking that seem pretty obvious to me, though for some reason no one has implemented them yet as far as know. For example, it’s great that there are outfits like Technorati and BlogPulse to let us know who’s linking to our blogs, but it would also be helpful if someone could tell us when someone removes a link. As things stand now, a blogger might retain a reciprocal link to another blog for months before noticing that the linking was no longer actually reciprocated. With instant de-linking notification, you would be able to respond immediately, either with retaliatory de-linking or with abject pleading for the restoration of the link.

Taking that idea one step further, social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Zaadz could include a “former friends” category, complete with big, black Xs through each photo. That would make things much more interesting, don’t you think? A columnist in a college newspaper I was reading recently talked about her angst whenever she discovers that the number of her friends has just dwindled — say, from 156 to 155 — and she goes down through the list and can’t figure out who’s missing. It must be terrible to lose track of one’s friends like that.

Blog ranking systems are in serious need of overhaul, as well. There ought to be some way of recognizing not only traffic and inbound links, but quantity and quality of output, as well. Why should popularity be the sole measure of worth? Some of the A-list blogs I’ve looked at could almost be composed by a robot, so brief and formulaic are their posts. I favor a ranking system that would factor in such things as the over-all diversity of topics; the average reading level required to comprehend posts; the number of regular readers who are not themselves bloggers, as indicated by commenters who don’t supply blog urls; the proportion of posts containing information not otherwise available on the Internet (with the exception of information about the blogger’s cat or cats); and the ability of the blogger to maintain a regular blogging habit despite a paucity of readers, comments or links. That sounds eminently programmable, don’t you think? Whether it will ever be implemented, though, I don’t know. I’m probably dreaming.

I know, it’s Friday, and maybe you were planning on dinner and a movie tonight. Why not give joint surfing a try instead? You could wow your date with a trip to the virtual carnival … actually, several carnivals.

Festival of the Trees #3 is full of new faces and some old ones too — check it out. And while you’re at it, be sure to take a look around Burning Silo if you haven’t visited it before. Bev’s great insect photography, graceful writing style and depth of knowledge about nature have few parallels in the blogosphere.

But don’t stop there. The latest edition of I & the Bird is unique: all links are in the form of haiku!

And as if that weren’t enough, the Circus of the Spineless celebrates its first anniversary with a highly entertaining format comparing the parade of invertebrates with a normal circus, for example: “Normal Circus: Trained Lions. Our Circus: Trained Aphids. … Normal Circus: Bearded Lady. Our Circus: Hermaphroditic Snail.”

So those are the features. Now good luck finding someone you click with.

I updated and reorganized my links page. Much as I hated to do it, I decided to create categories so visitors would have an easier time finding things of interest. This inevitably involved some quite arbitrary classifications. Blogs that, like my own, resist easy categorization went into the “Journal and Miscellany” section.

I’ve included a number of new blogs, and wrote descriptions for a few other websites and blogs that had been appended to the bottom of the page in its previous incarnation. Some noteworthy new entrants include KERBLOG, Heaven, Burning Silo, The House and other Arctic musings, Riverside Rambles, WoodSong, Blue Abstractions, F*R*L, Under the Fire Star, Dr. Omed’s Tent Show Revival, modal minority, and On the Face.

It’s always a quandry: how to do justice to this many-splendored blogosphere with one, fairly arbitrary collection of links. Some bloggers, reluctant to leave out anyone worthy, post great long lists. Others, anxious to draw readers to what they may consider underappreciated blogs, restrict their blogrolls to a small handful of favorites. Though I find both approaches equally tempting, I’ve tried to stay somewhere in the middle, cognizant of the fact that I can always draw attention to particular blogs and posts with the Smorgasblog — which probably has far more visitors than the Links page in any case.

I finally got around to revamping the coordinating blog for the Festival of the Trees – go look. The new sidebar features links to past and upcoming festival locations, which alone should make the blog worth including in blogrolls, links pages and bookmarks, I hope. And if your blog has been included in a Festival post, it should be listed in the “participating blogs” section. I’ll update the sidebar early each month with fresh links. And of course Pablo and I will keep posting announcements and reminders in the main column.

So please, if you have a blog:
1) Link to the Festival, and help us spread the word.
2) Blog about trees or forests, and send in the links!
Thank you.