A Bit More Detail

A while back, the Yorkshire Ranter had reminded me that the blogosphere isn't a unified entity but rather a collection of multiply overlapping social networks, these networks being separated from each other by language and nationality and specific interests. The examples that he gives are the Chinese and British blogospheres, each largely self-contained with their own concerns despite these concerns' relevance and interest.

Myself, it took me a fairly big push to find the various social sicence blogs I've added in the past couple of months to my blogrolls, going onto the Internet rather than depending on blog friends' blogrolls. I just wouldn't have found them.

So. What blogs--blogs I might have found on my own, blogs I might not have thought of--would you recommend for my reading (and, through [LINK] and other posts, my readers' reading)? I anticipate the results.

Welcome four more blogs to my blogroll!

• First is 80 Beats, a group blog based out of Discover magazine's website with a general science theme.


• Next is Rebecca's A Rusty Little Box, a Tumblr-based blog that contains photos, original art, and assorted notes.


• Vancouver journalist Douglas Todd's The Search is a penetrating study into religion in the 21st century postmodern world.


• Finally, there's Michael Steelworthy's blog. A graduate student at Halifax's Dalhousie University, this is a library-heavy blog that also demonstrates some of the applications of library studies.

Go, read!

I know how to use it!

It acts as a sort of RSS feed, yes, the sort that I already have via my FeedDemon reader. It's a place where you can find out things quickly. I just found out that the Voyager 2 spacecraft is almost thirteen light-hours from Earth thanks to Twitter. Twitter's advantage is that it's a personal feed, a palimpsest with others' comments and wit and quotidian observations. There may well be a worthwhile community there. TweetDeck has certainly proven to be a worthwhile download.

So. I'm at @rfmcdpei! My three lists--@rfmcdpei/news, @rfmcdpei/people, and @rfmcdpei/space--are listed on the sidebar below the link to my Twitter profile. Follow me, follow the things I read, follow everything, it's up to you.

Thanks to @osirius for providing me with the first few Twitter users to pick up, the space ones especially. I imagine there are more users to pick up. For that matter, I imagine that there are readers here who would like to pick me up. Please do; I'm tired of reporting bots for spam.

Remember, @rfmcdpei!

Everyone, I'd like to you welcome my friend Stephen Degrace's Infinite Recursion to the blogroll! Tech, and django and more, it's all there at this three-in-one blog.

Welcome Johnny Pez's blog and Mathieu Helie's Emergent Urbanism to the ranks!

One nice thing about LinkedIn is that I was able to run into London-based blogger Mark Dandridge, and yes, his blog is now on my blogroll. This Monday, he made a post referring in part to the volume of one's cultural product output, prompted by the discovery of an old digital photo memory card, that made me think.

Finding the memory card got me thinking about some old undeveloped film catridges I have that date back at least 6 years. I keep meaning to get them developed. They may have faded to grey by now. It'll be interesting to find out one of these days what I had photographed back then. I'm sure when I see the developed pictures it will be easier for me to work out how long the film catridges have been hanging around in a cupboard. The old days of taking photographs was a very different experience to the non-stop, click-fest that you often see these days. It would be interesting to take an old SLR out along with a digital camera and take a maximum of 24 or 36 pictures with each. Of course, with the SLR camera it would be functioning in the way it has always done but things would be very different for the digital camera.

The forgotten memory card, upon which I found the flower picture, is the smallest memory card I have. That's probably why I had forgotten all about it. It wasn't lost, just overlooked. It's 256MB which is still capable of holding around 69 pictures on the finest quality. Somehow the digital revolution has made less seem, well, even less, than it really should. I think 69 pictures is quite a lot. Just one look at a Facebook picture upload of a drunken night out, a wedding, a new born baby and you can often see way more than 69 pictures, where quite often, just 9 would be ample. I must start that '36 Exposures Only' Facebook Group. It may already exist. I'm off to check.

I like selectivity. Take my photos. This evening I uploaded a couple dozen photos to my Flickr account. These photos are survivors, having first made it past prescreening on my camera, then being checked out for more flaws after they were copied to my laptop, then the photos deemed worthy of uploading to Flickr were checked out one last time in the source directory where I'd shrink them to a workable size before submitting them to the view of the public. Less than one in five of the photos that I take make it to Flickr, probably less, while the number of blog posts I make are likewise only a fraction of what I might think at first I'd like to make. A couple of people have talked to me about how digital photography has changed photography from an art into a mere technique, just another form of electronic gadgetry that annihilates tradition and produces excessive volume, noise even. There's something to be said for that.

I also like abundance. Take this blog, which can easily feature a half-dozen posts a day, brief though they might be. Take the photo posts, which frequently include multiple photos. There's a lot out there in the world that deserves to be shared, and if the effort is conceivably worth it why not? I might not share everything, but what I do share I like very significantly indeed. I'm a person very much into preserving things, details, especially insofar as they concern the past and inform my present and future. I'm pretty sure that, somewhere, I still have the disposable cameras which record part of my August 2003 trip to Montréal en route to Queen's University in Kingston. I would so like to have these cameras survive and produce usable images, and not only so I could share them with you. Everything counts in small amounts.

How should I combine my desires for selectivity and abundance? I'm inclined to think that the way I handle things is the only way that I can tolerate doing things. I share with you the things important to me, this importance deriving from whatever reasons, and the idea of ratcheting down--or up--the number of items I care about leaves me uncomfortable, leaves me thinking of depression or else mania. It's tricky.

In the meantime, that 36 Exposures Only group on Facebook sounds like fun. Does it exist yet, I wonder?

I know that the speed and scale of this week's blogroll expansion is significant indeed, perhaps akin to that of a uchronical European Union that had decided to expand to include such cities as Tirane, Vladivostok, and Diyarbakir by 1995. In my defense, all these are very good blogs.

• Phil Plait's blog Bad Astronomy is a famous blog, one that not only takes a look at the wonders of outer space but one that deconstructs superbly ridiculous claims, like the one suggesting that the Jupiter probe Galileo's end-of-life collision with Jupiter was intended to trigger stellar ignition, terraforming the Jovian moons and bombarding the Earth with debris, in order to demonstrate that God didn't exist. Or something.


• Dan Hirschman's A (Budding) Sociologist's Commonplace Book is a blog interested, among other things, in the concept of "economics," how it got started and how it was used.


• The Grumpy Academic is the weblog of an American sociologist concerned with all manner of things relating to Asia, especially Southeast Asia, with a focus on sports.


• Kieran Healy's Weblog is, as it happens, the blog of Crooked Timber contributor Kieran Healy.


• My dear friend Erin Gallé's Lost & Found shows how wonderfully a person can engage with art and with this city.

Lately, I've been thinking about my post from the first of this month about how the lack of dialogue between different factions contributes to the collapse of the public sphere. There are three major newspapers in Toronto--the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the National Post--but because of the right-leaning nature of that last paper I've not linked to it on my blogroll, subscribed to it on my RSS reader, or even read it or cited its articles consistently.

Well, that's changed now. Welcome, <a href="http://www.nationalpost.com><i>National Post</i></a>, to my blogroll.

Thanks to dignam for pointing out his own article on the steadily decreasing rate per capita of violence, "Talkin' Gibbon in the Hypercloud" at the excellent group blog 3 Quarks Daily, which is incidentally now on my blogroll. Go, read!

Hi!

Three new blogs have made it onto my blogroll.

• First comes Michael's Bloor-Lansdowne Blog, a blogger representing an increasingly gentrifying neighbourhood that's just one TTC stop away from me.


• Next is Sean Winslow's Larkvi.com weblog, the weblog of a University of Toronto graduate student who--among other things--is documenting his ongoing research and other activities in Ethiopia.


• Finally there's Alex Harrowell's The Yorkshire Ranter, a sharp blog by a long-time contributor to A Fistful of Euros.

Enjoy!