First Post IM… with NotsoSoft

Darren: give me some thoughts about your first posting:
Darren: “7.2.00 I don’t think I’ve ever really counted myself as a fan; I just like what I like. Although, now I come to think about it, I did go through a phase of thinking that I could marry a certain pop star. Hey, I was eleven. (If you want to know who it was, tell me why you need to know and I’ll see…)”
Meg: Oh christ.
Meg: um
Meg: er.
Meg: Well, I started out about a year before, collecting mad/interesting/relevant links – I was doing it for a thing called hot sites, which involved a weekly pick and a bunch of blurb. (there’s a whole saga behind that, btw). When I stopped doing that, I was still collecting sites, because i just can’t resist exploring……..
Meg: …the internet for me is a bit like a massive, weird, ever expanding landscape…. worth exploring, always finding things which relate to other things…..my bookmarks became the travelogue of my journeys on the web….
Meg: ….the weblog grew out of emails that I was sending to whole groups of people – you know, here’s a funny site, have you seen this story, that kind of thing. The weblog became the scrapbook for the snapshots of a web journey, to stretch that metaphor just a little bit further.
Darren: yeah me to
Darren: I looked at Robot Wisdom and realised that I was doing exactly the same in email…
Meg: That’s not actually the first weblog post ever, though – there’s a text file somewhere for half of january – but february was the first attempt at designing it. And although my blogging style has changed enormously since I began, that first post eerily echoes forward to a lot of what I do nowadays – I make a statement, provide a link, relate it to me and then ask for feedback. The difference now is that people actually write to me when I prompt them to – and I love it. )
Darren: reading your blog archives is interesting… because there is a lot of development there and the aims of nss seems to have changed a little.. it starts off as a real linklog and becomes more “plasticbaggy“…
Meg: uh-oh
Darren: i meant that in a good way…
Meg: ;o)
Meg: When I started, I was in a phase of finding interesting links and figuring out a way to make them relate to my life. Like a kid, making sense out of her environment by becoming the central focus for it.
Darren: it’s interesting… how little control I had over the development of LMG… i assumed it would be about tech support links and comics. my subconcious had other ideas.
Meg: Me too – I intended to keep it pretty much “here’s a site. interesting,.. eh?”, but that’s clearly not happened ) Every so often I get pissed off at how much of me I’m giving away, and I try and reign myself in again.
Darren: I don’t have that problem… my friends are starting to read lmg and that is making me shy away from personal stuff even more… I think you strike a good balance.
Meg:but then I figure that frankly, the reason NSS works well (when it does, that is) is because I don’t try and make it into anything. Unlike some bloggers, for example, I don’t have a strategy for popularity or ingredients for the perfect weblog. My weblog is me, being, digitally and sequentially, I guess. I just kind of do my thing, whatever that is, and am stunned and amazed and insanely flattered and kind of confused and a bit embarrassed when people like it.
Darren: nss and plasticbag seem very similar to me for some reason… when you’re both in a “weblogging groove” you make it look so easy and natural…
Darren: same with lukelog… I sweat buckets [sometimes] over lmg and never feel I get that ease…. it always feels less spontaneous
Meg: interesting that you say that – i think nss and pb are *very* different…don’t know why, specifically, but though I like tom’s work very much, it always seems much more considered and planned (and edited…) than the stream-of-consciousness stuff i sometimes put up
Darren: interesting, I never felt that about tom’s blog until recently when I noticed that he does edit his stuff as the day goes by… [you can often tell by looking at the recently updated uk blogs list... his often updates but nothing much seems to have changed, whilst if nss updates 95% of the time there is a new entry]
Darren: unless you are redesigning
Meg: heh
Meg: now now, no need to point out how often i redesign ;o)
Meg: though i think this one’s a keeper…
Meg: i even added a foxy pic to the front of the site.
Meg: that’s commitment ;o