What Blogs Are For
Recently I stumbled upon a blogger named Penelope Trunk, and her blog entitled "How to decide how much to reveal about yourself" fascinated me. Be warned: it gets really heavy, really fast.
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Since discovering her this morning, I have spent almost half my day reading her other blogs. I am really, really enjoying her writing. If you are interested I am happy to share some good links.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that stands out to me about her writing, which I want to incorporate - she frequently links to various other articles and blogs. So if I find a topic I like, I can dig as deep as I want into it using her blog as a starting point.
In fact, Trunk has a post on healthcare which I think reflects a lot of the popular sentiments on the issue: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/06/04/career-decisions-shed-light-on-health-care-crisis-solutions/#more-2716
ReplyDeleteShe does not, however, bring the same incisive perspective as Gawande did. I prefer the surgeon's perspective still.
Ok, so far, she is already better at this than the four of us combined. She writes well, starts with an idea, does the research and presents an argument with the necessary support. I think her use of links in text is nice, but is more the modern, internet form of footnotes. It's nice, but not necessary.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I would still like to figure out the (Read more...) link, because I think that allows us to have more of a discussion, include links and photos, instead of trying to copy and past the entire url.
I think research tends to make better writers, because they have better and more thought out arguments. Our discussions tend to be to abstract. That's not a bad thing, just different. We're going to stand on the shoulders of geniuses, letting them do the research, then we will expand with healthy debate.
She takes the current concept of a blog and hits it out of the park. I do love her linking - I really, really wish we could get links in the comments working.
ReplyDeleteI think we are going for something different, I agree. The fact that 4 of us contribute and throw up a huge spectrum of topics means it's more of a community sounding board. It's almost like an internet forum, but hopefully more interesting and easier to navigate.
In fact, it's like a distilled and polished version of our Gmail threads. Guess that's not surprising.
Penelope's guide to blogging. I think this is important enough for the four of us to read. In fact, I think that as of right now, the only way we are going to succeed is through the four of us together expanding each others ideas.
ReplyDeleteHaha I think we are going to have to take some of that advice and leave some... for instance, we are in severe violation of item #2 by very definition of our blog. D'oh!
ReplyDeleteAlso she is talking specifically about a very personal blog. If you read her stuff abot 30% of her blogs and tweets are about her sex life / dating life, which probably won't be relevant to us. And since we aren't focused on a topic, a lot of that topic-focused career stuff doesn't apply.
That's okay though, because we are doing our own thing. I think the #1 point of what we are doing is just to write what we enjoy and be happy about the dialogue.
I agree with you that building on one another is the main point. And that starts with building on some really good thinkers who will be providing most of the starting material, I bet.