Snappy the Clam

I think I'm going to stay with MT.

Anil's eery, floating corporate head routine has been his job one since day one. I tell myself everyone else there thinks his monotonic drone is a necessary evil.

I dunno... WordPress is in bed with Yahoo for hosting. Maybe better to skip right to rails with Typo... :)

I'm just curious, as the person who wrote that post, I think it's the right tone for the audience I was talking to. I mean, of course I use a different voice when talking to personal bloggers, but what's wrong with speaking appropriately for the person you're talking to?

I'm definitely open to feedback if you think we should be saying something different (and I can absolutely understand if you're sick of hearing from me) but I don't know what that has to do with which tool you use.

Basically, maybe I suck at blogging. But why would you want to redo all your templates and styles and use a tool with fewer features because of it? :) Don't punish yourself just because you think I should be saying something different.

And Michael, c'mon... I'm out there plugging mario kart to people. Evil? Really, now.

Oops, lost my link:
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/03/09/nintendo-ds-review_cx_rr_0309toybox.html

Wordpress is pretty nice, gets nicer every release. :)

I agree, Ed, I've been doing another blog with it and have been pretty happy with what I've seen so far. Luke, interesting idea; my hosting company actually does support rails, so I could use Typo. I imagine, given Typo's youth, that I'd have to do some work on importing.
Anil, the very fact that you're doing this whole "maybe I suck at blogging" schtick here is pretty much exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. Personally, I think that blogging for the most part is well on its way to being the latest corporate simulacrum of "alternative" media. About the only thing I like about Six Apart these days is that 'FMU is using TypePad for their blog.

I'm realizing I probably can't win in this, because I can say what I think, and it sounds like schtick. I don't know what you read into blogging, but I can tell you for a fact that 90% of blogs are people just talking to their friends and family. That's not a corporate simulacrum of anything, that's just like email or the phone, people talking to people.

But I think you're thinking more about the public-facing ones, the ones that Technorati focuses on or whatever, and there's definitely been some co-opting. To some degree, it's parallel to what I was bemoaning about alt weeklies (http://www.dashes.com/anil/2006/02/03/alt_weeklies_s) where media gets disconnected from its community.

That concern aside, though, I am still stuck trying to understand how the fact that some people say things you think is unauthentic has anything to do with the tool. I mean, I work at a software company, and I think it's useful software, so I try to get people to use it. Does that make it less useful for you?

I mean, you've got an iPod. Apple also sells, I dunno, the XServe Raid. They don't have people dancing in silhouette with their storage servers, they talk about reliability and stuff like that. But you don't say "right, then, I'm buying an off-brand MP3 player".

Listen, I'm glad FMU has a great blog and does a good job of talking to their audience online. And of course I'm happy they use software from the company I work for to do it. But I really don't get how saying what I think, and coming here to actually have a conversation in hopes of learning something I'm doing wrong, makes all the dozens of people who work at Six Apart, and all the things they create, suddenly suck.

Anyway, I'm taking up tons of space on something that was probably just an offhand comment for you. If you're interested in the conversation, feel free to shoot me an email.