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  • Friday, May 06, 2005

     

    Musing on Blogs

    These are the odds and sods of my blog cruising today.

    In a mild bid for exposure, I wrote to Evan who does the Alternet blog Peek: The Blog of Blogs. I waved a few of my recent posts at him to see if he might write something up about my urbane wit. Alas, he found my SlashFic Dot Gov entry too racey for the Alternet crowd. He was very nice about it though and we've exchanged a few messages.

    He did recommend a blog, Real Conversation for Your Ass. It's a group blog and looks interesting to me.

    I can take criticism of my blog name. I have a kind of love/hate thing with it. I thought I was being a witty wordsmith with DemiOrator. You know, Demi = "one that partly belongs to a specified class or group" and Orator = "one distinguished for his (sic) skill and power as a public speaker." This was supposed to point up the fact this was my first attempt at a blog, hence inexperienced and only partially deserving of the name Orator. There was also a sly dig in there at the soapbox nature of blogging. Anyone can drag a box into the public square and practice their oratory to their heart's content. It don't cost a thing. Whether you actually say anything worth listening to is another matter altogether.

    When I started this blog I wasn't sure what I wanted to say. The spur to blog was the Dems convention in 2004 but I had a sense that I might want to comment on more than politics. I seem to have found a sort of equilibrium writing about what interests me: free speech issues, media criticism, religions in the commons, etc. I do have a humorous streak in me that I've been trying to express consistantly but not always successfully.

    All in all, I'm trying to have fun with this blog and hone my writing a bit. As I've commented before, I would really like to steer away from excessive quoting of other sources and focus more on my own writing voice and analysis. That's happened more over time so I'm making some progress toward that goal. My biggest obstacle was that, until this blog, I had not been writing regularly for many years. I was rusty and awkward. I think I'm a better writer now, this practice giving me some fluency in tenor and execution. I still flub badly on occasion but overall I've evolved during these nine months of blogkeeping. Thanks for reading.



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