and here we have them combined into one rainy monday. it was a very monday kind of morning at school, we all seemed to have brainlock, me and the students. so now i'm safely at home where it doesn't matter. sad to have the weekend over, it was so perfect. with our chincoteague trip canceled because of our friends' family health problems, we were contemplating going into DC for the protest rally and march. exhaustion won out, however, and we stayed here on delmarva: took walks, did a little birding, ate barbeque, read novels. a mini-vacation. some guilt occasioned by not going in for the demo, but it took me so long to recover from the one last march, i just couldn't risk that in the middle of the semester. we sent our vibrations across the chesapeake to the demonstration.
something that i'm having trouble understanding right now is the big project for journal excellence awards, complete with nominations, categories, votes, and probably even campaigning. seems like lots of folks are gearing into this. why? aren't journals something we do for ourselves? clearly some people are always better at things than others, but...so what? seems to me that the listing on journals of others we like is a good way to disseminate good writing, or graphics, or humor, or political commentary (a category not even listed) or whatever. i'm not understanding the impetus behind this vote. how many aol journals are there? so far i've found 7 of them i care to read with any regularity. compared with the large number of blogs outside aol that i could spend day and night visiting and reading. it's an amazing blogistan out there, the new face of journalism. it's the linking to the larger world that i find worthwhile. but i'm open to hearing other opinions.
5 comments:
I'm not understanding it either. The journals have been around for only a few months and already awards? I did enjoy the daily flashes of weeks ago. But I'm lazy...
Don't know about awards, it seems that it's reward enough to have people to talk to in a world that's still relatively free. But I know about rainy days and Mondays, and they are not so bad when you put some logs on the fire, and open a box of Krispy Kreme Donuts. I really like the glazed ones...
TG
My sense is that the AOL journal awards are less about "new journalism" than they are about appealing to the "mass"-ive mainstream in some way or another. In this sense, I see the Awards as being the equivalent of voting for the King and Queen of the high school prom...it seems there's a core "clique" of AOL bloggers, and the awards are really about who's the most popular within that most vocal and publically prominent circle! It's about pop-blog-culture...not "alternative" blogging...cvc
On "journals for ourselves"... Journals usually are "private", but the whole public blogging concept puts an interesting twist on that. Here, it becomes less about your own private reflections, and more about carefully selected and constructed introspections you don't mind sharing with literally anyone! It's an interesting inversion. It's also interesting to see who else overlaps with my perspectives (either because they read my blog, or I read their's).
I know most of the people that put together the blog awards. I run a strict OpEd kind of blog rather than a personal journal . I don't hype journals not even my own. The people running the awards aren't a clique. They may be patting each other on the back to some degree, but they're trying to get more people involved. I don't know any of them very well, but I hope they succeed. The more journalers, the more fun.
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