Tenebris

Mothballed

Must update my Technorati Profile.

Laying Tenebris To Rest

After dithering for many months, I've decided to retire Tenebris, the unofficial blog of Lulu.com, but to keep the domain salutor.com as my personal blog/site. My new professional blog is MarketingType.

The archives of Tenebris will remain available, and hopefully one or two of the smart folks who used to check in on the site will take an interest in my new endeavors. I and my associates have a number of sites "in development," as they say, among them a museum of spam and a site devoted to the poetry of paid search advertising.

If you are one of the stalwart souls who once subscribed to Tenebris, I'd like to thank you and once again to beg your forgiveness for having provided such an inconsistent resource. It's worth noting that Lulu, a company I spent four years helping build before leaving at the end of September, still has an official blog, and that the self-publishing forum I started in Google Groups now has a real administrator in the (very good) person of Dehanna Bailee.

Happy (independent) publishing!

Triangle Blogger Bash in Durham, Nov. 15th!

Leaving aside for a moment that I no longer deserve to be called a blogger at all...I do want to note an important event..

The Triangle Blogger Bash, organized by the energetic Anton Zuiker, will take place the evening of Tuesday, November 15th, 2005, in Durham's terrific American Tobacco Historic District between 5 and 7pm (details available at Blog Together).

If you haven't yet seen the lovely job they've done over there converting the old tobacco warehouses into shops and offices and whatnot, by all means come. It's a great space to hang out, eat dinner, and wander around. Bloggers, podcasters, blog-curious types...all are welcome. There will be a reception at the new studios of WUNC, refreshments, beer, and  some stimulating company. It's still warm. The moon is full. Come on out! Lulu is one of the sponsors, and I am supposed to say a word or two about the Blooker if I can keep my wits about me.

Bloggers seek to tackle reality television

Cameron and Damien Barrett, identical twins and longtime bloggers, are waging an online campaign to get themselves onto the reality television show The Amazing Race. They've asked fellow bloggers to help out by linking to their site, and I am happy to oblige.

I have been waiting for the first reality show contestant to publish an account of his or her experience as a Lulu book. While I can't give away any secrets, I have high hopes that it will be soon. The Amazing Race, for those who don't follow such things, is highbrow as reality shows go. Inviting bloggers to participate is a terrific idea.

House of (Book) Blogs

The fine folks at WebdelSol offer a compendium of book blogs in the new feature, House of Blogs.

Blog-apallooza

The 2005 Triangle Bloggers Conference turned out to be both interesting and well-attended thanks to the efforts of Anton Zuiker, Paul Jones, and many others. The blogging world was well represented of course, with attendees including Dave Winer, Bigwig, and the young father who writes The Trixie Update (which appeared prominently in a recent NYT story), but so was the world of traditional media in the person of Dan Gillmor, the keynote speaker, as well as others in the audience like Phil Meyer, a journalism professor and columnist for USA Today.

If you've been to more than one blogging conference, you've probably heard the same topics covered ad nauseum, but one of the things I found interesting to hear was a debate over the various motivations for blogging in the first place, which are--not surprisingly--very much the same as debates over why to write at all, why to paint, why to create. Do you create a blog to be read? Do you do it for yourself? Are you motivated by altruism or ideology?

Of course you create a blog to be read by other people. It's disingenuous to pretend otherwise. You may counter that a true creator is by definition someone driven by a compulsion, but it is impossible to separate the desire for a reaction, for an audience (both of which equal status and affection), from the impulse itself. You are always writing for other people; writing itself is a form of communication, which is to say that it is directed outward, and not inward.

While I would be the first to volunteer that writing provides me with a way to think more clearly, which is of benefit primarily to me, the same could be said of talking. If I wanted clarity but didn't want to communicate with other people, I'd meditate quietly or scratch my thoughts in the sand.

When you write, you do so for other people. Not to take anything away from the diversity of motivations that informs all human (and publishing) endeavors, I would add that the desire for status--for power and respect and affection--stands squarely in the center of all our interactions with other people, like it or not. Of course you want your blog to be read, your novel to be read, your music to be heard. Many of the writers I see would perhaps do better work if they were more frank with themselves on this point. But there are those who steadfastly assert that they create for themselves alone. More power to them, I suppose.

I was very impressed with the intelligence on display at the conference, from a mini-discourse on the long tail theory and blogs by BigWig--whose eclectic Silflay Hraka includes a fascinating series of Holocaust photos called Unseen History--to an explanation by journalist Ed Cone of the pioneering adoption of blogs by the Greensboro News-Record.

BigWig made an offhand comment that those of us attending on from Lulu were perhaps in a unique position to appreciate. He noted that "blogs are the bleeding edge of vanity publishing." Indeed! [And I thought Lulu was the bleeding edge...but nevermind] That comment came back to me more than once during informal conversations between sessions as no less than two different individuals interrupted my attempt to explain Lulu by saying, with typical dismissiveness, "so it's just a vanity press, right?" Ummm, yesss . . . in the same way that Typepad or Blogger are vanity presses, or DreamWeaver, for that matter.

The Internet itself is the ultimate marketplace for vanity publishing, is it not? In that most of what drives the creation of blogs, personal web pages, etc. is in fact ego (see above). But leaving aside the complexity of ego-driven motivations, some part of all this publishing is -- as no one could credibly deny at this point -- useful. Which is also true of the 19,000 (and counting) titles published on Lulu.

It was ironic to hear bloggers of all people scoff at the idea of self-publishing, but there are always  those on whom irony is lost. Even as the conventional media slowly comes around to accepting the significance of blogs and other web publishing ventures, it is useful to remember how the emergence of the web was once treated. Newspapers, television, and their brethren were fairly slow to adapt to the web because they saw it as one enormous vanity press. If anyone can publish anything, protested pundits, all you will end up with is a sea of nonsense. They treated the web like a public pool. Many of them still feel that way about bloggers. And some bloggers, in turn, seem to react the same way to Lulu. But that will change.

On a related note, the UK Guardian ran a story today on the unprecedented accessibility of publishing that specifically mentions blogs being turned into books (including a note about Lulu-hosted LJBook): See "Cover Stories." [post script--the article is actually an old one, a fact I missed when I first blogged this]

After the conference I got to spend an afternoon drinking beer and shooting pool at the Cave (as we often did in days of old) with my old friend, Matt, who has been through quite a few of these exercises in blog-talking. He, too, has started to weary of the phenomenon of blogger triumphalism that inevitably arises when you get a bunch of bloggers together, particularly those of a political bent. The dangers of "Blog Overkill" were noted in a recent Slate.com article by Jack Shafer, who has suffered through the chanting of more than one set of would-be revolutionaries. More than one blogger at this conference described his work as research or investigative journalism, which suggests a frightening lack of perspective on the kind of work required by real investigations (given that most of these folks are just using Google). I was reminded of the ridiculous blog-fueled speculation about the box under George Bush's jacket. Newspapers get it right most of the time. Bloggers, in aggregate, get it right some of the time. Having both is better than having only one.

That said, the world is full of experts in all kinds of obscure areas, and they can publish a web page (or publish a book) as easily as the rest of us. And, poor editing and all, those people can offer something that is valuable to others. Shafer's article offers a cautionary note, too, to those of us promoting a revolulution in publishing. Nevertheless, I remain an unrepentant blog enthusiast. Blog on, comrades! And if they don't like it, let them read Slate.

Guardian's Top Ten Literary Blogs

The Guardian UK--itself no slouch at blogging--has posted a list of the top ten literary blogs. Handy. Some of the usual suspects appear, but there are also one or two that are new to me.

Long Tail media: blogging toward Bethlehem

Chris Anderson has posted a pretty succinct outline of 'long tail'-driven changes in media using, of course, blogs as exhibit A. He closes by referencing an essay by Dan Gillmor, which provides me with a good opportunity to note that Dan Gillmor will be attending the 2005 Triangle Bloggers Conference, which will take place at UNC-Chapel Hill on Saturday, February 12. The conference has been put together by Anton Zuiker and Paul Jones and is shaping up to be quite an event. I am pleased to report that Lulu will sponsor coffee and donuts that morning.

The Long Tail Gets Longer

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired and author of the essay "The Long Tail," now has a blog dedicated to bringing together some of the thinking provoked by his long tail thesis.  At the moment, he is apparently traveling in India and taking in the collision of hi-tech and developing economy. I keep hoping Anderson will turn his attention to Lulu at some point, but right now some of the most interesting pieces of his blog are in the "long tail comment elsewhere" section.  As I noted here when the original essay was published, Lulu is most similar to Anderson's example of MP3.com, which he described as "all-tail." I am convinced that there are ways that Lulu can get around this, but not without much better filtering technology and an ability to attach independently published content to content with an existing brand, like a John Grisham novel.

By the way, NPR ran a good story this morning on the growing popularity of audio books.

Today in Alternate History

Today I ran across the weblog of Robbie Taylor, dean of the "Alternate History Academy." It doesn't quite rank yet as a storefront of the day because he's just begin publishing a serialized novel on Lulu, but it looks very promising. I'm looking forward to more.

NYT Blogger Roundup On the Election

The NYT offers a roundup (a pretty random assortment, really) of bloggers on the election today. My personal favorite is Ana Marie Cox, otherwise known as Wonkette:

I was all set to vote for George Bush even after finding out that he wouldn't let me marry Mary Cheney if I wanted to. And when he made the pronunciation of "Lambeau Field" a campaign issue? It seemed fair. After all, he's proved that not knowing the names of foreign leaders is much less important than correctly pronouncing the homes of popular sports teams. Of course, he totally sold me with the debates: any man who explains a mystery bulge as bad tailoring is more than confident enough to take on the Euroweenies. But in the end, with the fate of the free world at stake and all, I've got to go with the guy who would admit that sending thousands of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians to their deaths to protect us from imaginary weapons was, in fact, a mistake.

Queen of the Sky

Queen of the Sky, a blogger (blogette?) who posts stories and photos about her life as a free-wheeling, cocktail-swilling flight attendant (and I say that with only the greatest admiration for the position) has made the news by being suspended from her job for blogging. She may also have unwittingly entered the pantheon of internet heroes of free speech, joining Tucker Max, among others. Perhaps Queen of the Sky has an interest in publishing a book on Lulu?

MobyLives returns

The book blog of Dennis Johnson is back after a long hiatus: MobyLives returns.

Another publishing blog

Annie, another Lulu employee, pointed me to this one: Making Light, a publishing blog by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, an editor and author. Looks to be pretty lively and, based on a couple of posts dissecting the false promise of self-publishers like Authorhouse, I'm already impressed.

An official Lulu.com blog

Tenebris is, of course, the unofficial blog of Lulu.com, which is to say the blog of Stephen Fraser (me), the marketing arm of the organization. Marketing digit, really. I started Tenebris partly out of frustration that we had been unable to get it together to create an official company blog, partly as a way to keep track of storefronts that tickled me, and partly because I missed my old blog, Equilugubrium, which I more or less abandoned a couple of years ago. But it quickly became apparent to me that Lulu.com needed an unofficial blog that was not bound by the necessity of promoting an approved point of view. As of today, it also has an official blog. Let's hope it takes.

On another note, Lulu.com lost an important piece of its DNA today. We will miss him greatly.

WSJ on bloggers at the convention

I missed the WSJ story (subscription required) on convention bloggers when it came out and ran across it today via Wonkette. It may be interesting to no one but me, really, but the story includes a picture of my friend Matt. He apparently told the Journal beforehand that he hoped to cover the behind-the-scenes Convention action. As far as I can tell, he either didn't come up with much to cover or he was too busy to post it. I found the WSJ's gossipy "Celebrities Uncensored" section (once again, subscription required) more insightful than the relatively straightforward blog reports I read. Excerpt:

Actor Ben Affleck, responding to Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball" about where he fits on the political landscape in Arnold Schwarzenegger's California: "I'm definitely a girlie man."

Convention blogger roundup

The Washington Post has penned a pretty comprehensive, link-laden roundup of the blogging going on at the Democratic National Convention. I'm not much of a devotee of political blogs (although I have been very impressed by Wonkette), but being a political TV junkie I have spent a fair number of hours watching the convention coverage over the last few days. My friend Mathew Gross is one of the thirty or so "credentialed" bloggers at the convention and while my preference would be to call him and dissect the political posturing over the phone, he is apparently too busy to talk this week so I've been reduced to adding sardonic comments to his blog during commercials over the last few nights. It's a sad state of affairs. He is obligated to take it all pretty seriously, I suppose. I gather he's meeting lots of interesting people.

In defense of blogging

From trAce Online Writing Centre (new to me), a Canadian writer posts a love letter to blogging as an art form. Yes...art form.

To call blogs literature would be to turn them into an elitist, edited, and vetted art, one which is contrary to their very nature. The complexity of what blogs and their reactionary, perfectly contemporary, accessible prose could mean to the future of sustainable storytelling, to truth in journalism and to the survival of democracy, is too great to call literature.

Robert X. Cringely on blogging

Like most 'professionals,' tech columnist Robert X. Cringley is a little hung up on the notion that what 'amateurs' produce on the Web is categorically different from the writing he and other journalists engage in. He elaborates on his reservations in this column: Together at Last: Maybe the Best Use for Web Logging Is to Teach Us More About Ourselves.

What bloggers do may be different, but it is not categorically different, no matter what the pros tell themselves. From the standpoint of access and perception, the market may well decide that the information and analysis provided by amateurs is the information it finds most valuable. Cringely has a lively intelligence, however, and he concludes his column with a great joke, so his take on this subject is worth reading.

Pew Internet & American Life Project: Content Creation Online -- Report

It's probably poor form to link to an article about blogging so early on, but I ran across the Pew Internet & American Life Project: Content Creation Online -- Report refenced in an article in the Online Journalism Review. From the Pew report:

Content creators break into three distinct groups: Power Creators, Older creators and Content Omnivores.

Power creators are the Internet users who are most enthusiastic about content-creating activities. They are young – their average age is 25 – and they are more likely than other kinds of creators do things like use instant messaging, play games, and download music. And they are the most likely group to be blogging.

Older creators have an average age of 58 and are experienced Internet users. They are highly educated, like sharing pictures, and are the most likely of the creator groups to have built their own Web sites. They are also the most likely to have used the Internet for genealogical research.

Content omnivores are among the heaviest overall users of the Internet. Most are employed. Most log on frequently and spend considerable time online doing a variety of activities. They are likely to have broadband connections at home. The average age of this group is 40.