If you have an embedded Technorati account set up on your blog and you would like to swap links to support each other, let’s do it!
If you want to link up, please post a comment here or send me a note in email letting me know you forged a link to “David W. Boles’ Urban Semiotic” or — if you must for design or aesthetic reasons — just “Urban Semiotic” if that fits better.
I joined the blog promotion portal Blog Explosion one month ago today. Blog Explosion is a place where you can promote your blog, meet new people, and get some good tips on how to improve your blog.
I had no idea how many visitors I would have after a month. I hoped for 1,000 and, as you can see in the image of my account below, my hope was more than doubled with 2,084 visitors and those numbers reflect only Blog Explosion visitors.
Forgive me for being Mr. Grumpy today.
Here’s a short — okay, it’s longish — list of things that make me grumpy when I read blogs of others and I realize 99% of what I say will insult 95% of the blogs I’ve read so far:
The tagline for this blog used to be just Rendering Meaning in the City Core and this week I changed it to read… Where Blood & Bone Render Meaning in the City Core …and some have asked why I made that change. I came to realize this week that a successful blog, if it is to have meaning beyond the self, must in some way speak personally to you, the reader, in a genuine manner.
Here are some tips on how NOT to write a blog:
1. Don’t Post for Days in a Row: No one is interested in what you have to say so why say it as often as every day? People don’t like an ongoing relationship so be sure to keep them at a distance with unpredictable posts. There is no better feeling than to read the same thing over and over. Leave it up to whimsy, instead of reliability, to find you.
2. Pick a Boring Blog Name: There’s nothing better for a blog than choosing a name that no one gets or understands. Be obtuse. Make no sense. Don’t use your actual name in any way because that would be too egotistical even though there is no better way to feed an ego and build self-importance than by blogging. Your name is not your brand you have not been building over a lifetime so why use that self-created goodwill in your blog?
The Peter Brooks ideal of an “Urban Semiotic” can be found in his fine essay The Text of the City (from Oppositions, 1977) where he defines “urban semiotic” as:
…a way of discovering, elaborating, the codes which would allow the indifferentiated surfaces of modern urban existence to reveal their systematic meaning….
This site was named Urban Semiotic over the more familiar “Urban Semiotics” plural because the singular “Semiotic” — unlike its plural cousin — is an adjective first and a noun second and I’m never bringing any of this up again!
David W. Boles’ Urban Semiotic is where Blood and Bone Render Meaning in the City Core.
There are few people in the world who have the ability to be successful while also being kind and friendly.
SuperAgent to the Stars Matt Wagner is one of those special people who manages to find common ground between the needs of business and aesthetic and then strikes a fair balance between writing and commerce.
Matt and I have known each other for over a decade and each year brings a new fondness and appreciation for the hard work he does for every author and publisher in the business.
Formerly a lead agent at Waterside, Matt Wagner just started the Fresh Books Literary Agency so if you are looking for a good man and a fair spot to lay down your weary pen after finishing your monograph, touch in with Matt first to see if he can help you and tell him David W. Boles sent you.
If you are an aspiring book author I want to give you some blunt author-to-author advice you will not likely get from your publisher or your agent. Agents and publishers generally do not want this sort of discussion to take place between authors because they don’t want us sharing this information.
Here’s an interesting survey from Ipsos:
Washington, DC – Debate continues about the effect that blogs are having on politics, media and public opinion in the United States. A recent survey conducted by Ipsos reveals one in three of Online Americans had read a blog at least once. More than half of blog readers say blogs influence public opinion (68%), mainstream media (56%) and public policy (54%). Updated periodically throughout the day, they provide online commentary on anything from politics to religion to celebrity gossip.
Three In Ten Online Americans Claim That They Have Read A Blog Thirty percent of the online population said they had read a blog at least once. Among those who read blogs, 38% do so at least once per week. More than two in five of those aged 18 to 34 (41%) and those with a college-education (41%) have visited blogs at least once. Geographically speaking, blogs are most popular in the western United States where 37% of residents reported visiting a blog.
When former Yale Professor, former heroin addict, former alcoholic and Emmy winner writer/producer David Milch creates a script, he eschews period punctuation in scene directions. Milch prefers the double dash – for its employment suggests the infinite possibilities of a pause in the moment where great things can happen feverishly and invisibly off the page in the vacuum created by the indiscernible Em-dash. A period bespeaks a prosaic finality that the ephemeral creativity of David Milch cannot bear and even in a colloquial telephone interview the double dash is always there – pausing – waiting – jockeying just beyond the ether of a cross country conversation.
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