~B-SCAN with Rebecca Blood

B-SCAN is a series of interviews with bloggers who include blogging as part of their integral transformative practice, and those who are "consciously" aware of the impact of blogging on self, culture, and nature, "integrally informed" or otherwise.

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If there's indeed a Kosmic Blogging Goddess, Rebecca Blood is her incarnation. She's been blogging her heart out way back since 1999 when there were only a handful of "webloggers" experimenting with the new medium. She's a blogger with a passionate mind and compassionate heart, the author of the classic The Weblog Handbook, which has been called 'the Strunk & White of blogging book', was chosen by Amazon as one of the 10 best books on digital culture in 2002, and has been translated into 5 languages – a must-read for all bloggers who want to learn how to "blog it down the bones."

Rebecca's Pocket is an icon to veteran denizens of the blogosphere. When Rebecca is not hyperlinking, she's out there changing the world one speaking engagement, one conference, one forum, one article, one interview, one "targeted serendipity" at a time. Recently, she was kind enough to take some time and grant me this email interview. We talked about her personal experiences, her visions about the blogging medium, and the philosophy that fuels her passion. She's living proof that one doesn't need to have a complicated theoretical philosophical system to express compassion in the cyber and the real world.

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*** Hi Rebecca! First of all I would like to express my deepest gratitude to you for granting me this interview. But before we begin, allow me to get this out of the way… Thank you for writing The Weblog Handbook. It was the first book I read about blogging. The insights you've shared in that book have been my guiding principles in my own expression. For what it's worth, this blogsite is what it is because of the foundation you laid down in that small booklet. So whenever people ask me questions about blogging I always recommend them to start with your book so they can "blog it down the bones." There, I said it :)

That's a wonderful testimonial. Thanks.

*** So, when did you get started with blogging?

The first weblog I ever saw was Scripting News. I have no idea how I got there -- from some other website. Scripting News pointed me to Camworld, and Camworld pointed me to Robot Wisdom, and it just went from there. I was enchanted. These sites were smart, irreverent and they pointed me to reliably interesting things. That was in 1998.

At the time I was a Web designer, and in April 1999 I found myself working from two different desks. I had created a little local website, basically an expanded bookmark list. I decided to put it online so that I could access it from either location, and when I did that, I thought "I'll just start a little weblog". It wasn't hard: I already knew HTML (there were not yet any blogging tools). A week later, one of the original webloggers pointed to me, and I thought "Oh crud! Now I have to keep doing this!" Fortunately, I love it, so that hasn't been too much of a problem.

*** How often do you blog?

I try to update every weekday. When I started, of course, I updated 7 days a week, like everyone does in the honeymoon phase. It has varied. While I was writing my book, I updated only 2 or 3 times a week. But right now I aim for 4-5 really interesting links, 5 days a week. I usually collect links throughout the day (and I have an ongoing collection of unused links from days past). Once a day (usually in the afternoon) I sit down and start to assemble an update. I often find a link in that "unused" list that is the perfect complement to a current news story, and so I'll put them next to each other for context.

Once I've chosen the links, I start arranging them, trying to decide the best order. Sometimes I'll add something lighter to the list, if it seems like a particularly "heavy" day. (I started this after my husband, years ago, sent me an email comment on that day's Pocket that consisted essentially of the message "Doom and Gloom!")

Once I've done all that, I put them into Movable Type (which I switched to in January, after 5 1/2 years of hand-coding my site) and schedule for them to go up around 7am Eastern time the next morning. I used to have to wait until *I* was up to post them, but now I can make sure that there's something new on my site when people on the East Coast get to work.

I've thought about scheduling one post every few hours to see if that increases my traffic at all, but I doubt if it would. For one thing, I care only about *visitors*, not visits. I don't serve ads on my site, so the number of people is the only thing that matters to me, not how many page views I get. Is the same number of people visiting several times instead of once a day an improvement? I don't see how.

And for years now I've been putting up one multi-post update a day, and getting people to even notice that that pattern has changed would be pretty hard. Based on my email and comments, I'm sure I have some readers who visit my site every few days, so they'd never know. Anyone who comes on the weekend must be coming only once a week, because there is never any new material on those days, so again, no difference. But MT makes it easy to experiment with that sort of thing, so I might just give it a try just to see the result.

*** How much time do you spend reading other blogs?

Honestly, I try to spend as little time doing that as possible. I get sucked in and then half the day is gone. I use RSS to follow the sites I read, and between the blogs and the news sites, it's easy to spend 2 hours a day just getting current. I'm trying to devise a new system for myself that will be more efficient: less time, more information (somehow). It's hard, because I want to read more widely than I do, and at the same time I have a life I want to spend on more than online reading.

Perhaps I can create a consortium of bloggers, and we can divvy up a list of wonderful blogs and news sources, then just read each other's blogs and recycle each other's best finds. Synchronized information foraging and filtering.

*** What satisfaction do you get out of blogging?

I love sharing information. My aim is to point readers to interesting things they would probably otherwise have missed. "Things you didn't know you wanted to see." That's what my favorite blogs do for me.

*** Do you think blogging is an artform? Or just another fad?

Neither. Humans are hardwired to share information, for storytelling. This is how we survived on the savannah. This is how we still survive in our communities, at work -- and on the highway: by identifying patterns. By sharing information. First we did it around the night fire, then at the market, and then around the water cooler at work. Now we can do it online.

*** A while back you referred to blogs as, "as a coping mechanism." And now, people are recognizing blogs as an effective personal development tool. In your experience, how did blogging help you in your own personal development and your relationship with other people?

It has definitely made me a better writer, and I've seen many people improve in that respect simply as a result of blogging. It has made me more aware of what I think, and more cognizant of the potential holes in my arguments, so perhaps it has made me more persuasive. I wrote about these effects in Weblogs: A History and Perspective and those observations are still true today.

An unfortunate effect of the sheer number of blogs that now exist is the (inevitable) formation of echo chambers, in which people just have their pre-existing biases reinforced at every site they visit. I don't know what to do about that.

*** Speaking of relationships, didn't your husband, Jesse James Garrett (another pioneer in his own right), the first blogger who linked to your blog?

Yes.

***So you guys hooked it up hyperlink-style. Nice. That sounds like a blog movie in the making :)

I like to think of our relationship as a smart action thriller with an awesome soundtrack, but I'm afraid it's actually more like one of those Lifetime movies.

***Suweet :)

*** Did you have any bad experiences with blogging? Like people stalking, flaming, or harassing you in real life because of your blog? How did you deal with it?

I have never had to deal with real-life harassment as a result of my blog. Remember, I'm famous among dozens, not millions, and so far no one has been motivated enough to travel cross-country to lambaste me for my political opinions (fingers crossed). I endured plenty of that on Metafilter, though.

Mostly, it's been pretty benign. Once a guy recognized me when I was at a movie, but I didn't find out until he posted it the next day on his own blog.

Once a blogger posted a little bio of me on his site. As you know, I rarely post about myself on my blog, and this was before I had a bio up, or even an about page. He assembled quite a picture based purely on the little tidbits I'd posted over the years, but that meant he had to comb through years of archives to do it. That really brought home the thing I tell people over and over: posting is publishing. Once it's online, it's out there. Think before you post.

And once I got an email from a German guy who wondered if I could send him pictures of having my head shaved. It was a little creepy.

*** In your recent keynote talk you said that, "we are standing at a unique moment in time. Technology connecting people will shape the coming age into which the world has so recently entered." Based on what you've seen and heard from the conferences and speaking engagements you attended, how do you think would social networking and blogging impact society in years to come? Any pros and cons?

The usual stuff: connection, collaboration, and echo chambers.

At some point, the issue of digital identities is going to come to the fore. It's going to be important in two directions. You know how you often can't use your preferred login on certain sites, because someone else has already taken the name? Or how you have different names you use in different forums, but at some point, you'd welcome the opportunity to have all of those names identified as *you* (or at least as belonging to the same person)? So on the personal side, people will want ways to simplify and manage all those identities you collect being online over time.

The other side of it is accountabiity. Online, how can anyone know that you are you? Just as important, online how can you *prove* that you are you -- or that someone else is not? I found someone posting under my name in an online forum once. I was alerted by a mysterious email, and as far as I can tell someone was trying to get me to point to their site, or to incite a yelling match between me and my imposter. "You are not me!" "I am too!" It was a teeny site, and a few months later the whole thing disappeared. But what if it had been a more public forum? As the Internet becomes an everyday part of people's lives, these issues will become imperative.

*** In your essays and talks you have adopted the term "participatory media." You've also used the term "Age of Participatory Culture." Can you expound on this?

I coined the term "Participatory Media" to describe what I think is new about blogging. Citizen journalism, online diaries.... Those terms describe blogs in terms of pre-existing forms, and they can be quite accurate when describing individual sites. But the great mass of bloggers is doing some combination of those things and more. We are shaping, filtering, commenting, contextualizing, and disseminating -- interacting with -- the news reports (and other writing) produced by others. That is genuinely new, and I don't think enough attention has been paid to it.

The Age of Participatory Culture refers simply to the ease with which the combination of digital media (culture) and the Internet have enabled individuals with no particular status, connection, or training to communicate and collaborate with each other and to create their own work out of existing materials -- and then to publish them.

Apple calls it "Rip, Mix, and Burn". They are selling something, but they understand the larger trend.

*** Have you heard of Integral Theory / Philosophy?

No.

*** Sweet. Now we can skip the theoretical stuff.

:)

*** So, what's your philosophy in life? How do you apply that to your blogging?

Hmmm. I suppose integrity is the cornerstone of my thinking about my own conduct. It has always been very important to me to be able to look myself in the eye when I'm standing at the mirror. I've made a lot of goofy choices. But at the time I was usually doing my best, and trying to do the right thing, and so I can accept what I did.

The hardest thing, I've found, isn't forgiving the bad things people have done to me. It's forgiving myself for letting them.

I think I am innately conscientious. I want to be kind. I try to be fair. I work hard to think clearly about things, and to communicate what I think and feel. Those things carry over to my blog.

*** Do you have any practice that can be called or qualified as "spiritual"?

Not currently. I grew up going to church, and I liked that. A few years ago, I tried meditating every morning, but I never got very good at it -- it became almost an exercise in scattered attention instead of one-pointedness. I might try that again one day.

I like the idea of giving thanks 7 times a day, as outlined in Always We Begin Again, but I can never remember to do it more than once or twice. I do often recite Psalm 100 while cleaning out the catbox in the morning, waiting for the coffee to brew. Jesse and I often marvel at our lives and at how very lucky we are. But I'd like to make it a conscious practice that is woven into my daily life.

*** When you wrote The Weblog Handbook, why did you decided to focus on writing instead of the technical aspects of blogging?

I didn't know any of the technical aspects of blogging! I had a Blogger account, but I never used it to update my site. Besides, writing and living online are the essence of blogging to me.

When the book was first published, numerous people criticized the fact that it didn't talk about using the tools. But 4 years later, the books that were published concurrent with mine are outdated -- the software has changed too much. New books keep coming out detailing how to work with the latest version of this program or that, and now there is a wave of books about PR and business blogging. Every new publication sparks interest in the blogging, and people keep buying my book. In retrospect, writing a general book about blogging was the smartest thing I could have done.

*** Before we wrap up, I've been wanting to ask you this a long time ago... what's up with this fascination with Goth? :)

I've spent many happy evenings in goth clubs, talking, dancing, and listening to music. I haven't found any clubs to inhabit in San Francisco, and since I got married, my motivation to find them is nil. But I still wear all black.

*** Nice. Black is cool. :)

*** So, what would you advice people who want to follow their passions?

Get clear. Then get started.

There is a Chinese saying I like: "Do not be afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still." Try to take one step every day, even a small one.

I really like "Wishcraft", by Barbara Sher for guidance in discovering what you really want to do, and then for a really practical approach to achieving it. Your library probably has a copy.

*** Do you have anything to add?

Nope. :)

*** Thank you very much for your time, Rebecca.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

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what's in Rebecca's Pocket | articles and essays | bloggers on blogging

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Tagged @ Zaadz with: compassion, nature, passion, philosophy, self, fluffy, blogs, bscan, bloggers, B-SCAN, ZPod:KB101, Leprechaun Jar, ~C4Chaos, ~C4無秩序, Rebecca Blood, Kosmic Blogging Goddess, Age of Participatory Culture, interview, Goth, Jesse James Garrett

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Tagged @ Ma.gnolia with : bscan, blogging, bloggers, fluffy, b-scan, ~c4chaos, ~c4無秩序, kosmicbloggers, kosmicblogging101, kosmic blogging goddess, rebecca blood, self, culture, nature, philosophy, passion, compassion, goth, age of participatory culture, jesse james garrett