* we have a few more entries over at Yearly Lukery - familiarise yourselves with each other and generally bow down. viget turned up. yay! and teemu turned up in a different post here (ewastud - feel free to join in the frivolity). the consensus appears to be that people seem to think im smart because nobody can understand a word i say (which has disconcerting parallels to the real world). meantime, i'm dazzled by all of your contributions, experience, expertise and generosity - so thnx again. (I apologise, again, for not having been more involved in this particular conversation - i'm trying to juggle a few too many things atm).
on a more serious/possibly-productive note - are there any changes that you think would be easy (for me) / useful (for you)? truth be told, i dont really blog for an audience - per se. i pretty much do the exact same thing now as i did in 2002 when i was sending out an email to two friends (this blog actually started just as a way for me to keep a copy of those emails - i'd sent off the email and then copy and paste it here - which is why my archives of those early days are literally unreadable)
as i say, i dont really blog for an audience (as much as i love y'all) - but i kinda see that i do five things.
1) i just grab quotes - in an 'egads! did i just read that? - we need an historical record!' kinda way
2) i add some commentary to some of those quotes, usually just pointing out some absurdity or disgust or other
3) occasionally i try to synthesize certain stories (eg the recent zarqawi thing)
4) deeply try to disentangle and solve and prevent war crimes (eg trying to understand sibel's story, or get an overview of larisa's reporting etc)
5) a little bit of campaigning - (eg disclose denny, and the impeachment polling fund)
so... anything i can easily improve on? obviously points 1 and 2 are commodities that you can get at any of a gazillion other blogs - yet they are 90+% of my posts. i certainly dont read as widely as i do so that i can post stuff - i simply have a voracious reading appetite and interest in all the assorted crimes - and the copy/pasting/blogging aspect is neither here nor there. is it a nuisance to see lots of random posts on random subjects interespersed hither and thither? would it be of any value if i tried to organise them a bit in terms of subject matter? do many of you take an rss feed? would you prefer longer/shorter/fewer posts? doesnt matter?
or maybe it would make more sense to have a separate sibel blog? perhaps a group blog? does that sound like a good idea? anyone else wanna volunteer? it wont take any effort from me to put all the sibel stuff in one place. perhaps we can get some campaigns going re sibel - as miguel says: "I hope we all can keep the momentum going and help push these issues back into the mainstream media, where they belong." - perhaps we can build a campaign based on all the new States Secrets stories that are finally coming to the fore.
any other suggestions?
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8 comments:
Luke,
is it a nuisance to see lots of random posts on random subjects interespersed hither and thither?
would you prefer longer/shorter/fewer posts? doesnt matter?
My observation (and this is really about blogging on a particular issue in general, and not about this blog specifically) would be that it is sometimes difficult to know whether to post 'down the page' in an existing thread to continue a discussion, or to recap and take the discussion up to the latest relevant post. The obvious case (as far as I am concerned) is currently Nigergate, do I continue in yesterday's "niger: dumb intelligence" thread or do I go on and start afresh in today's "who forged the Niger documents, and why?" post (complete with its Still, the question remains, who forged the documents, and why? prompter), when we've already covered a lot of the ground on this topic over multiple threads?
(Either way, I've got car-fixing to be done first. Hopefully there won't be a third choice to consider by the time I get back!)
I don't know how you keep up with it, but I like the broad cover that you provide. The cutting/pasting is appreciated. It's often difficult for me to get to all the sites. Your editorial sense is excellent. Plamegate, Sibel and Larissa all get focused, thoughtful treatment here. Personally, I'd like to see you continue as you are - I don't know how you keep up the workload, but it's admired and appreciated. If some of the commentators want to make contributions, work with you, or assist you in any way that would be good. According to your own interests, Lukery. But what you're doing is just great.
what damien said. and yeah, i love my rss (but when sites offer atom, i totally can't use them--just sayin'). as well, it's a misconception that reading posts in a feedreader won't count on one's stats--they totally do. lately it seems that e.g., digby and others can't make up their minds between total posts in my feed and just the first bit (forcing those who want the rest to click to the site in question).
lukery, i too don't write for any other audience but myself, to kind of keep track of stuff. i used to record the 'OMG--unreal' quotes thing but gave it up--it got to be too much for me.
if someone like me can mostly follow what you're posting (well, apart from the intricacies of the Sibel horror especially the related tentacles to whatever other coverups, although i do read everything here), i'd say you're doing great as is.
no complaints--keep on keeping on (ugh, i let my hippie out, lol)
um, gentlemen, i don't think it's time--haha, psych!
ps, the separate Sibel site sounds good--it would be good to read it all in one place so one can refer and link and hopefully, Sibel's plight would get wider coverage.
simon - lol - good luck with your car. after yesterday i wasnt sure if i'd ever see you again!
you do bring up a good question - i've broached the issue before, sans resolution, about 'hijacking my own threads.'
based purely on my own experience, i suspect that 90% of readers dont read the comments - but you guys are all so clever that most of your comments deserve a wider audience - therefore i frontpage them, which means that we have a new 'thread' - which usually only lasts for a comment or two, till i hijack it again when someone says something that deserves to be FP'd.
does anyone have any good ideas about how to deal with this problem?
obviously in an ideal world we'd have all the relevant discussion in one place, and everyone would be exposed to the observations within - and everyone's arguments could logically develop on a consistent base - rather than me (and others) trying to re-create the arguments in shorthand, which leads to misrepresentations and assumptions and whatnot.
i'm with simon - this is a problem. i dont know what the answer is. part of the problem is that i dont have the traffic to jsutify people clicking on 'comments' to read what one or two people wrote - which is why i 'promote' comments to the front page. another part of the 'problem' is that i write 5 or 10 or 20 posts per day - which means that the comments are necessarily dispersed.
i wouldnt dare compare myself to emptywheel - but she only posts every day or two - which means that there's a place for her commentors to congregate in the interim and collectively develop reasonable arguments.
maybe thats the solution (and this is why i brought up the question originally) - should i have two active blogs? one where i publish the headline stories (not that i actually publish the headlines - but rather, usually, just a snippet within the story) - and then a separate blog where i speculate, and you guys can join in there as well. would that be a better situation?
(i've just realised that this comment didnt go thru yesterday when it was sposed to)
rimone - consider me psych'ed
One of the more interesting aspects of WiiG4, IMO, is the 'information clearing house' feel to it. True, commentary is light relative to other blogs (I almost had an aneurism at the 25 on the first YrlyLkry thread), but then, so much information comes through that there isn't enough time in a day to really thresh it out. That is compensated for, somewhat, by snippets of 'pre-processed' thought quoted from other blogs.
That said, you suggested a companion blog. As an alternative, any thought on a companion forum?
don: "One of the more interesting aspects of WiiG4, IMO, is the 'information clearing house' feel to it"
that's kinda funny - cos as i mentioned, i'm not really trying to provide that at all. i'm not trying to provide anything, really - but least of all, that.
the ICH stuff is literally just a sub-function of the fact that i read a lot. if y'all find it a useful resource, great. if you all disappeared tomorrow, i'd still read the same stuff, and record the same snippets. as i said, it's all a commodity that you could find in a thousand other places (although it's probably humanly impossible to cover more ground than i cover)
don: "That said, you suggested a companion blog. As an alternative, any thought on a companion forum?"
interesting thought. there are a few reasons why i dont get many comments. first and foremost, i dont have a very big audience. an average day is between 500 and 1000 hits. second, i dont provide a good forum for comment discussion - for a variety of reasons. a) i have so many posts that they all get dispersed - which means that there's very little interaction b) the timezone thing doesnt help c) i often dont respond immediately (which is sometimes related to b) d) by virtue of the above, everyone gets EPU'd, most of the time.
i'm not exactly sure what you mean by "companion forum" - do you mean like Moon of Alabama at Billmon's place? or perhaps just a consolidated discussion area every day. perhaps that's a good idea. an open thread every day where all the comments to all of the posts for that day (should) go - perhaps with an exception where i write a substantial post (rather than excerpts)
let's give that a shot - i'd love it if you chatted amongst yourselves some more in a many-to-many sense - cos it sucks to see so many insightful comments epu'd
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