This one's for all the mad bloggers: a new trend, captured in today's NY Times, and causing me to bolt from the table to the keyboard, which of course is precisely what the article would warn against: "Blogging at a snail's pace" by Sharon Otterman:
The practice is inspired by the slow food movement, which says that
fast food is destroying local traditions and healthy eating habits.
Slow food advocates, like the chef Alice Waters
of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., believe that food should be local,
organic and seasonal; slow bloggers believe that news-driven blogs like
TechCrunch and Gawker are the equivalent of fast food restaurants — great for occasional consumption, but not enough to guarantee human sustenance over the long haul.
A Slow Blog Manifesto, written in 2006 by Todd Sieling, a technology
consultant from Vancouver, British Columbia, laid out the movement’s
tenets. “Slow Blogging is a rejection of immediacy,” he wrote. “It is
an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly.”
(Nor, because of a lack of traffic, is Mr. Sieling writing this blog at
all these days.) Ms. [Barbara] Ganley [the focus of the article], who recently left her job as a writing
instructor at Middlebury College, compares slow blogging to meditation.
It’s “being quiet for a moment before you write,” she said, “and not
having what you write be the first thing that comes out of your head.”
And then there's this note of caution from famous blogger Andrew Sullivan who wrote "Why I Blog" for this month's Atlantic, whereby he recounts what happens when he takes a break:
When he took two days off to make sense of “the whole Sarah Palin thing,” his audience flipped, thinking he was dead or silenced.“You
can’t stop,” Mr. Sullivan said in the online interview. “The readers
act as if you’ve cut off their oxygen supply, and they just flap around
like a goldfish out of water until you plop them back in.”
