All The World's A Stage

Panel: Blogs as Literature, Xposted

Panel: Blogs as Literature (4-19, morning)
Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games
Hemos of Slashdot.
Neil Gaiman

I've got to say these panels are great - and basically impossible to take notes on. They expand your mind in this... amorphious way. Not a way I share to people who aren't here.

So... snippets.

"I used to want to be a telepath, and then I started reading blogs." ~ A quote from one of Steve Jackson's friends.

On comments:
You have to be careful of who you want to see it, and what you put down there. On slashdot.org, people ask to have their comments removed... slashdot won't do. People really need to think about what they're about to post before they post it - even if you delete your blog, people will be able to find it on Google forever.

Neil on control:
He controls the dialog on his journal - and you can go there and see that.
His favorite blog is Making Light - Theresa's Blog, and he loves her disemvoweling - what she does to the comments of trolls - takes the vowels out.

In the US getting stuff out of the cache:
You really can't do it within the US without going to court under copyright law.
In the UK/EU there are privacy laws that might work.

On blog entries:
When things are the most exciting and the most is going on, that is when there are the shortest and fewest blog entries. So we miss things, possibly the most exciting things.

So we're reading what people wrote in their spare time - a lot of it is not very exciting.

Question to Neil (summarized) - How can you stand the bad grammer and punctuation, and do you think blogging will damage the language?

No, doesn't bother him, he thinks blogging is good for literacy. Anything that makes you use the language is a good thing.

Steve Jackson thinks it's all about reading books. Good examples of literature and grammer, which helped teach him grammer more than school ever did.

But Neil thinks "People have a remarkable facility for finding diamonds on the dunheap and knowing what to keep."

Hemos thinks the language is fluid and shifting, but that's normal. Lanuage will adapt.

"I know the biggest, best and most reliable tool for any author is word of mouth." - Neil.

(which reminds me I need to link to the Bear.)

Pepy's blog is being posted at http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1660/11/05/index.php.

When is a blog literature?

When it's not a discussion board? Collaborating on literature, especially in blog form, is Very Hard.

Surprises on what people comment on:

Steve's going cold turkey on sugar and caffine.
Neil's Golum/Smegal Slash. (Not only a ton of hits, but about 400 hate mails.)

"The thing about blogging is that I have no constraints on me to actually be right." ~ Neil.

Posted by Liz at April 19, 2004 12:35 PM