Departments
Editor's Note: Blog rolling
By Steve Lange
It’s a rhyming dictionary, but still. When it comes to bloggers, that definition works as well as any.
Gartner Research, a technology group that monitors the blogosphere, estimates that there are currently 100 million personal blogs, 99 million of which focus solely on what shenanigans the blogger’s cats pulled on an hour-by-hour basis (“10:17 a.m.: Señor Snugglesworth and Lil’ Troy Bolton are leaping oh-so-playfully at the Swiffer. Hahaha! Lil’ Troy Bolton just went for a lil’ Swiffer ride! I mean he was literally riding on the Swiffer as I Swiffered the kitchen floor!!!!”)
And, starting December 1, the four women in the office and I will, hopefully at least few times per day, be blogging on our desktops. (Which is a phrase that, had I typed it 20 years ago, would have gotten me fired for sexual harassment.)
We are not, obviously, on the cutting edge of the tech movement. When one of the I.T. people here asked if we’d be Twittering, I said something like “Well, maybe at first, but I’m sure we’ll all settle down once we get the hang of it.”
Like a lot of magazines, we tend to put much more emphasis on the print product, and we’ve mainly considered personal blogs—the instant publication of materials that previously had to go through at least some sort of vetting process—to be a little too easy. Cheap. Well, dirty, even.
It’s like watching—versus getting—an interoffice massage. It seems so much more innocent—and acceptable—if you’re one of the rub-ees.
When it’s your cubicle mate getting that backrub from that one woman in every office who gives random massages, and he is the one moaning and saying things like “Oh, god, yes! Lower back! Lo-wer baa-ck!”, it just seems dirty.
We kicked off our blog this week (at www.RochesterMagazine.com). We’re now directly involved in the blog world, and it just feels good. It’s a work in progress, very fluid, but it’ll have a little bit of everything, with a lot of Rochester—from Rochester rumors to random interoffice gossip to where we’ve spotted the cheapest Bud Light prices in town.
We had also held off on starting a blog because, frankly, we had been a little frightened of the reader comments that accompany—and play a major role on—many of these things.
Online anonymity, apparently, reveals the worst in people. I mean, sure, we’d all love to scream horrible obscenities at people who, say, walk too slow in front of us or have that one dumb style of hair. But the threat of being recognized keeps us from acting on that impulse. Instant commenting has changed all that.
Back in my day, when we wanted to verbally attack someone anonymously, we had to physically cut words and letters from various magazines and then paste them onto a sheet of paper. That paper had to be put in an envelope and walked to the mailbox. It required a bit of work ethic. It involved some stick-to-it-ive-ness.
Godwin’s Law—also known as Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies—is an oft-quoted blog adage that’s been around since 1990: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
So, in the interest of keeping the Rochester Magazine blog somewhat positive, or at least to keep discussions moving forward, we will vet all comments before posting them. They’ll still be anonymous if posters choose, but they’ll be more like letters to the editor. And our regular readers know that we publish plenty of negative letters to the editor. They’re usually much more fun than the positive ones. We want your input. We just don’t want you to compare us to Hitler.
When the Post-Bulletin ran a seemingly innocuous story about Rochester Magazine two years ago, one anonymous poster wrote:
“The so-called ‘editor’ of this so-called ‘magazine’ thinks that whatever he says is gospel. You can tell by looking at his stupid picture that he thinks he’s god’s gift to writers.”
There’s more, but it gets kind of mean.