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The Dialect Survey is about three hundred questions, so don't start unless you have time, but it's cool if you do. Perhaps more cool are the maps plotting the results in little color coded dots across the country, confirming that we New Englanders are the only people who say rotary.
Sep. 20th, 2002
Doc Searls makes a really good point about the nature of weblogs, and I think it's relevant to why I chose to move my daily meanderings off of LiveJournal. (Yes, I know some of you are reading them there. Don't distract me.) He says, inspired by this comment by Clay Shirky, that weblogs are like radio. Webloggers are broadcasting to the world, rather than having a conversation with their readers. And you know, that's pretty much true.
LiveJournal is much more oriented towards conversations. The community feature is perhaps the most obvious facet of this, but the friends pages are another one. You create a community with your friends page. I've had, on occasion, the experience of being surprised that two people on my friends page don't know each other -- "but they post right next to each other! How odd!" And, of course, since everyone can see who you're friends with, there's a tendency for friend groups to overlap like crazed Venn diagrams. It'd be kind of fun to crunch some numbers on that, see if it's possible to find the friend clusters and how much they overlap, but I don't really have the techniques.
I'd be curious to hear from any of my LJ readers: does my journal there feel any different than anyone else's? Do you notice that I'm not really writing for that particular submedium? Do I look odd on your friends list, besides that I have links in all my titles and I ramble on at great length?
Guilty pleasure: Billy Joel. I suspect this New York Times article is morosely grim even if you're not a big fan, though. Or maybe it's just pathetic. The man is certainly whining -- but if he was more credible, wouldn't there be something worthy about a guy who weighs the value of love so high against the rewards of fame? Instead, it's just the Piano Man, and he's hard to respect.