The Liminal Librarian

I always get a kick out of reading about authors’ overreactions to negative reviews, but it’s been a while since I’ve read some great ones. (See all the fun from last April for more along these lines!)

So, I was pleased to see some new rantiness appear. Here is just part of a mind-boggling example:

In last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Caleb Crain reviewed Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. While regular NYTBR watchers like Levi Asher welcomed the spirited dust-up, even Asher remained suspicious about Crain’s doubtful assertions and dense prose.

But on Sunday, de Botton left numerous comments at Crain’s blog, writing, “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

You don’t see a lot of schadenfreude in blog comments these days! Maybe it’s all moved to Facebook and twitter, too. Oh wait — something has! Check this out — Alice Hoffman (although she later apologized and deleted) got mad enough to post the private email address and phone number of one of her negative reviewers to her twitter feed. Hmm. Maybe I should finally get myself a twitter account after all, apparently I’m missing all the fun…

I’ve been playing happily with FriendFeed for over a month now, and quite enjoy it — the ongoing stream of conversation and links there, combined with the pokery of Facebook, give me the feeling of coming home to the multiuser chat boards of the early 1990s. I also enjoy the serendipity; I keep a FriendFeed window open that I dip into from time to time during the day, and always see at least one or two links/comments worth further exploration (or simple amusement!).

One thing that nags at me, though, is the way in which using multiple sites fragments conversation. Someone might comment on my Facebook status on FriendFeed, for instance, but my Facebook friends won’t see that comment or be able to join in the conversation. Someone might comment on a blog post on Facebook, but readers over here will miss that discussion entirely. (Let alone, I haven’t even made it to twitter yet — and probably won’t, since I can’t afford another time suck!)

Over at Walt at Random, Steve Lawson comments on the usefulness of FriendFeed, saying in part:

You will see that some blog posts that got very few comment have actually sparked a discussion on FF. Also helpful for blogs like Caveat Lector that don’t have comments enabled.

I pull blog posts into both FriendFeed and Facebook, and notice that posts (and Flickr photos, for that matter) that garner no comments at “home” may get comments elsewhere. This is neat, but again leaves no record here and doesn’t inspire blog readers to join in the conversation.

Ironically enough, I recently saw a link to the following on FriendFeed (there’s that serendipity again…)

Dear Blog,

I feel like I have neglected you to hang out on Facebook and even sneak off with Twitter.  I am so busy these days communicating about what I am doing, thinking, eating, watching etc that I really have little time for a deeper relationship like ours.  Oh, blog.  You were my first love (if you forget my youthful romance with bulletin boards, chat, and texting).  Well, in any case you were my only serious commitment but that was before I met Facebook. You see, on Facebook people actually communicate back to me but almost no one ever posts on you my dear blog.

I’ve been trying to get back to my own Dear Blog, but admit that the ease of a 2-second status update on Facebook is generally a more seductive pull — and that friends (or “friends”) over there are likely to comment, where here it’s a more hit or miss proposition.

Where these thoughts are leading, I’m not yet sure. But, feel free to subscribe to me on FriendFeed, and I’ll likely return the favor — and comment here, there, and everywhere!

Tomorrow, you will say to yourself. Tomorrow I will start afresh, and I will type all day to make up for the pages I have not written today. With the best of intentions, you will go to sleep...But on the morrow, when you wake and rise, you will not write. You will blog.

- Vampires of the Internet