Uh, more on resolutions and blogging.

I forgot resolution 7: I need to do a little spiritual research as well. Big questions, starting with "Do I believe in a god or gods?" More of this anon.

Right now I wanted to hold forth on blogging and some of the features of the blogging genre. By the way--here's a new award for blogging, courtesy of Mr. Barefoot.

It's tough to pin them down. The corpus of available material is huge beyond comprehension. Never before have so many written so much with (sometimes)so little meaning.

Usually we could analyse the text of a given selection of blogs, but even good blogs vary enormously. We defined a few basics in an earlier post; basically blogs are immediate, intensely personal, and written in a functional form (grammatical English in the case of this particular sample of blogs).

But normally we'd analyze deeper, sift the actual text for metadiscourse. That is, what is it that people are saying, not only by what they write but in the ways that they choose to phrase it?

However, that would require a team of research assistants, and I'm only one person. So I'll confine myself to a few things I've spotted with my educated eyeball (the left one, the other is quite, quite ignorant).

A glaring omission is modality. Modality, basically, is the admission htat you might be wrong, and is signalled by the presence of words and marker phrases which set conditions on what is true and when; such as "in this situation" [X is true], "whenever"[this is true, X is true], or even "basically".

But bloggers don't go a bundle on modality generally, it seems (modality marker--I could be wrong). Even some of the best seem to state their cases with, apparently (I'm really big on modality), an assumption that either they're 100% right, or that the post is taken as only their humble opinion. Late-breaking modality marker: IMHO.

From BlogsCanada (prettily done template, dude):

Political opinion in the US is much more polarized than here in Canada with bloggers on each end of the political spectrum more strident and less willing to listen to the other side's point of view. This could indicate a level of frustration that is exemplified in more opinionated blogging.

Of course this limits the terms of possible discourse. Apparent absolute certainty tends to put people off.

But where blogging often scores over "normal" means of communication is that sometimes we get that rare nugget, an expert in the field. This is especially true with industry insiders. This is the great service done for us by the first corporate blogs, until the inevitable limitations were slammed into place shortly after the first internal critiques appeared.

Now the line between PR and corporate blog is being deliberately smeared, as companies, and indeed their PR departments, set up "blogs" for the sole purpose of advertising or promulgating certain approved information. This will change the genre, as such blogs become less obvious, more subtle and cunning.

Now as to the look and feel of good blogs. Going on my own perception, coupled with a few elements observed during the great blog search: The text of a good blog, oddly, is small. This may be due to the enormous screens that people are beginning to display them on. The sidebars are narrow and the posts short and usually fairly pithy. The colours take second place to the text, but cannot be neglected.

If I am to improve this blog to the standard I'd like, well I'd have to quit work. But I can make a few good changes; today the text size. But really, the trouble is that I need a whole new template. Much as I like this one, it's getting too stringy with all the lines of HTML I've been pasting in just anywhere.

I also need to start writing shorter posts. Although some folks get away with long ones, they mostly create intro sections.

Resolution number 8: Learn HTMl well enough to create my own blog template from scratch.

Resoultion number 9: Shorten blog posting until I can include sectional teaser-type intros.

In keeping with which: So long.