Delicious LiveJournal Links for 6-12-2010
Jun. 12th, 2010 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker-
(Now waiting for someone to point out all the things it doesn't contain)
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Now I understand everything!
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More fries with your deep-fried pizza?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2010-06-12 11:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 12:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 11:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 11:59 am (UTC)Exactly one book on the list was fantasy. And I think that lavishly copying Tolkien and producing Extruded Fantasy Product is one of those traps that writers should be warned about.
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Date: 2010-06-12 12:07 pm (UTC)(And I see a lot more merit in what many people call "extruded fantasy" than those people tend to. There's a lot of extremely good fantasy writing out there, and not all of it needs to be or is aggressively original in its setting. However, it tends to get ghettoised and belittled, with the implication that the millions of people who enjoy it are therefore clearly just stupid or tasteless.)
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Date: 2010-06-12 12:52 pm (UTC)Getting from "There are too many Tolkein clones" to "Anyone who likes mainstream fantasy is brainded" and then following it up by slagging off the lit-world is not just hypocritical, it's phrased in such a way as to put off the vast majority of people who might be interested in engaging with what you're saying.
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Date: 2010-06-12 01:08 pm (UTC)I'll delete the comment if you like.
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Date: 2010-06-12 01:11 pm (UTC)I generally figure the way to deal with people saying things I disagree with is to say something myself, not to delete what they said. Especially when they're someone I feel I can talk to about things in a reasonable manner, like yourself.
If you want to delete it then go ahead - let me know and I'll kill this whole thread. But if you're happy with it there then that's fine :->
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Date: 2010-06-12 01:16 pm (UTC)FWIW, I still think that the comment in the post is slagging off an entire genre which many people enjoy, by effectively saying "if you're writing fantasy with elves and dwarves, you're de facto writing bad work."
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Date: 2010-06-12 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 01:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 01:22 pm (UTC)Something along the lines of "If you want to debate stuff here then go for it. If you want to rant, then that's what your own journal is for."
(Which is completely not a go at you, by the way - it's just part of what I've been thinking about when considering how to make the comments here more conducive to people discussing rather than shouting at each other.)
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Date: 2010-06-12 01:37 pm (UTC)I think you'll surprise a number of people - it's a bit formal for LJ. Seems a bit "LJ are srs bizness".
Have you considered starting a seperate blog? You seem to get a lot of exposure, and the kind of conversation control and exposure you're talking about seems to fit better with the blog model as it's seen these days.
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Date: 2010-06-12 01:40 pm (UTC)WarrenEllis does it though. I should do some reading about this.
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Date: 2010-06-12 01:45 pm (UTC)As for retaining readers, I'd just suggest repeatedly pointing out that your entries are now on your blog, and NOT re-posting most of them to LJ. Let's face it, do many of your current readers not have some kind of RSS?
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Date: 2010-06-12 01:47 pm (UTC)I believe that RSS has something like a 15% take-up amongst the general population. When I recently set up a syndicated feed for Sian I had to explain to her twice what it did, because it's just about over the limit of what most people intuitively understand.
Tempting though.
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Date: 2010-06-12 03:22 pm (UTC)A lot, but not all, of the snobbery surrounding LJ as a platform has gone now, it's now seen as just as valid as Blogger or Wordpress.com.
There's definite merit in self hosting, or at the very least having a domain name for the blog, but there's also no reason why an LJ can't be taken seriously.
Specifically, before we both decamped to Dreamwidth for our primary hosts,
That was, partially, because I knew how to game the system a little bit, but it was also because many of the top blogs linked to her regularly. That was when she was using an LJ community for her 'blogging'.
Trackbacks are deprecated, most of the top blogs in the UK turn them off, PITA and full of spam. Discus is meh, I prefer LJ commenting, LJ needs to revamp the OpenID UI, but that's a specific problem that a paid user could overcome if they wanted. SEO is an issue, but LJs can have good SEO and pagerank, not as good as a blog using proper permalinks, but judicious use of tagging can be effective.
And definitely disagree re crossposting; turn comments off, yes, perhaps exerpts only, but abandoning existing casual readers'll piss them off.
Especially those of us that use LD/DW as our RSS readers of choice.
@Andrew.
300-500 readers per day is actually pretty good for a mid range unpromoted blog.
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Date: 2010-06-12 03:33 pm (UTC)TBH these days, unless you have a specific niche, building up a personal blog is a PITA that's possibly not worth doing.
Much better to join/setup a group blog for people of similar inclination and topic areas, then you get a pooled share of link, shared readership and if one of you is unable/unwilling/not int he mood to post for a bit, you don't necessarily lose readers.
You're right about RSS takeup; most readers will come via a bookmark, the addressbar, searching directly or a link. Ergo, if you're offline for two weeks, people stop coming back and the blog loses a lot of traffic, etc.
I keep meaning to write a "how to blog for serious attention" post or 5, but, y'know, me and posting are occasional friends currently. The group blog model is useful though; I can post to LibCon whenever I like, so if I need something to get said, I have a massive audience (including half the BBC political team). And I got asked this morning to post something to Politicalbetting.
There's a definite market out there for a blog doing the sort of stuff you mostly do, but to really impact, I reckon you'd need more than just you doing it.
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Date: 2010-06-12 08:15 pm (UTC)If I was less stressed and had more attention span for writing then I'd be posting more. And if I had someone else who wanted to go in with me then I'd be up for doing it. But nobody has ever suggested it to me. If you know anyone that might be interested then let me know ;->
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Date: 2010-06-12 12:07 pm (UTC)Quick, South Korea award her an award as best Sci-Fi author and see if she accepts it ;-)
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Date: 2010-06-12 12:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 12:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 12:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 12:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 01:15 pm (UTC)10 most harmful...
Date: 2010-06-12 12:31 pm (UTC)Awesome.
Re: 10 most harmful...
Date: 2010-06-12 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 12:39 pm (UTC)I do totally agree that Catcher In The Rye is a complete pile of shit that has made many writers (and non writers) think it's honorable and romantic to be a self-absorbed douchenozzle.
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Date: 2010-06-12 12:48 pm (UTC)I never made it through Catcher in The Rye - I arrived at it a good five years too late.
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Date: 2010-06-12 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 12:53 pm (UTC)Rand could have used an editor but there are tons and tons of books out there written from a crazy left wing point of view. I think it's completely fair to have one famous book out there written from a crazy right wing point of view.
The story itself is actually sort of interesting. I think Dagby Taggert is wrong in the conclusions she draws, but I like her as a character and I can see how a person raised in the way she was would come to those conclusions.
The main problem with Atlas Shrugged was that it was written in a time when capital was created through industrialization and did not anticipate a time when capital would be created by service and information.
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Date: 2010-06-12 05:33 pm (UTC)