Slow but not sure. A handful of entries, but-- if related to previous iron noder attempts-- a marked improvement. Although I certainly have many things to node about, I keep hesitating. One positive thing I've noticed is that what I've noded so far this year has received much more feedback by private message than many years previous. I find myself commenting more and more on other people's contributions as well, and not just niggling little typo corrections, but inspirations, bits i like, things the writing has reminded me of...
I doubt I'll make the 30 to meet the Iron Noder quota, but I'll get close to it if i get the gumption up. Part of the hesitation is due to doubts about Why I'm writing for a site that appears to be moving nowhere. Why should I contribute to something with no established purpose, no sense of direction, and no indication that it will be here in the near future or beyond? This is a conflict that's plagued me for several years, and since I don't have an answer, I've been trying to get beyond it and just write.
Just Write. That's the mantra and the motto.
Everything2 idea:
One of this site's great concepts is the pipelinking. The other, by accident I think, is the copyright reverting to author 'unless stated otherwise'. There's nothing that indicates anyone involved with the site will co-opt my writing for a book, promotion, another site without proper compensation.
We've had writers start here and go on to bigger and better things, maybe we should start inviting other writers here, specifically bloggers. Writers who are blogging interesting things, writing about what's happening in the world in an extensive way, writing about artists, films, books, architecture, music, politics, love, travel... all the things written about here anyway. As the writers retain copyright, they can leave their work here or take it away whenever they feel like it. So I'm going to get together a list of a dozen bloggers I think would work well if they put some of their subjects on e2, and email them an invitation to join.
Day Log:
A few years ago I worked with a group of people to pull together all the places you can go to in Scotland to be physically active-- like football pitches, gyms, and parks-- for a website. Lately I've been employed to review all this and make corrections. It's a pretty long and dull slog. One of the bits of the site includes the location of the place on a Google map, and I've had to correct this or make it finer. While we were orginally putting the site's data together, Google was doing its Street View capture, and now I've found that this is helping me. While on a map it might show a play area surrounded by fields you could play football in, checking the location in Street View shows me the green fields have houses now. Also, when we weren't given full information by various councils about equipment in play areas, we had to squint and assume that shadow matched a swing. Now, I can pop the address in, zip around in street view and see that there's a swing, some roundabouts, a climbing frame, etc... or see that the swings are only suitable for toddlers.
Sometimes when I do this, I feel like I'm in that scene in Men In Black, where Tommy Lee Jones zooms into the garden of his abandoned sweetheart. This especially kicks in when i click too fast, and the map turns into giant pixels.