Teleidoscope

Tue, Dec 05, 2006

Lurking

Posted at 10:00 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Over on Making Light, ones of the blogs I read regularly, there was a recent article about businesses that are trying to rent commenters to bloggers who want to attract people to their blogs. People supposedly don't like to be the only commenters at a site, so the bloggers hire claques to make the place look busy.

I can almost understand the temptation: it's hard to write without an audience (and the site here is quiet enough to hear crickets) but the thought of a paid audience is just creepy.

I don't really have a right to complain about the lack of comments here, since I follow all sorts of forums and discussion groups and mailing lists and usenet groups and blogs and rarely comment myself. If there is a lively discussion going on, it somehow feels rude to stick my comment in. I need to work on that.

I also need to get a LiveJournal account so that I can comment on the blogs that are hosted there. There are supposed to be ways to sync this Blosxom blog with the Live Journal account, which I should investigate.

One thing happened this past week that I am very pleased about. I have been reading the rec.arts.sf.written Usenet group (and its predecessor, rec.arts.sflovers) for more than 20 years now, but have posted to it only very rarely. For the past several months I have been making an effort to post regularly, or at least occasionally, on the Girl Genius discussion group on Yahoo. (That effort turned out to be part of the ramping up to the creation of this blog). Last week one of my comments on the Yahoo forum was quoted by someone on rec.arts.sf.written. Someone thought what I wrote was articulate enough to be worth quoting.

I kept going back to look at it. But I didn't comment directly on rec.arts.sf.written. I really need to work on this. I can't expect anyone to comment here if I don't take part inthe greater community.

But I can't imagine what it would feel like to have someone quote me or write about my stuff and know that I had paid them to do it. Ewww. What an odd mix of whoremongering and exhibitionism you'd need.

Move Status: Packing of things like clothes, and kitchen and bathroom stuff is about as far as it can go while leaving the apartment livable for the next few days. Papers still need to be sorted and computer-related stuff needs to be organized: something to do tomorrow evening, with backups to be done Thursday evening after I print out the maps and pack the printer.

The weather in Pennsylvania is looking better for the weekend than Buffalo.

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