zorca interviews xian

Suzanne Stefanac is writing a book on blogging called Dispatches from Blogistan (catchy title, eh?) for Peachpit / New Riders. Naturally, she’s been blogging the whole process and posting snippets of work in progress and the texts of interviews she’s conducted for the book.
I know Suzanne from The Well, where I host the blog conference and where I’m known as <xian> and she’s known as <zorca>. A while back she interviewed me via email and she recently published the results on her book’s blog: Dispatches From Blogistan – interview with christian crumlish.
In the interview we talk about blogging (of course) as well as social media, RSS, wikis, politics, media, authority, trust, online presence, the long tail, and other stuff I hope you’ll find interesting. I know I had fun doing it.

shacker's blogging the heck out of sxsw

I’m doing my best to blog about sxsw this year but Scot Hacker’s doing a great job of it. The only way for me to find out about the things I’m missing (good panels that are at the same time as other good panels, parties at the same time as other parties) is to find and read the blogs covering the event.
Scot’s recent post, The “Real” SXSW, tells a great tale of how the real high points of being here have nothing to do with the daytime schedule.
tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

Fertility, Conception, and Adoption blogging

Marie Myung-Ok Lee, who has been blogging her book tour (on my Mediajunkie network) at MarieLee.net has recently landed a gig writing Fertility Blog for Adoption.com.
Meanwhile, Lindisima Lovely has been writing Ms. Conception about trying to conceive a child as a single mother, also on my little Mediajunkie server.
Do I sense a trend? I do.

Blogger, can you spare a dime?

A short story about the posta-blogalyptic future.

Blogging from New Orleans

My friends Steve and Elizabeth are blogging the reconstruction of New Orleans from within the city: Inside the Bowl.
We stay with them when we go to Jazz Fest (nearly every year), and we were very worried about them when the flood and hurricane hit. They evacuated successfully and their house wasn’t harmed, and they’ve since moved back in.
Steve was writing us these fascinating email messages with photos, so I asked him if he might like to blog about the recovery of the city. A little mumbo jumbo, a little abracadabra, and voila! Inside the Bowl joins the Mediajunkie publishing collective.
I’ll be reading the blog every day. Will you?

Tour de France blog

One of the blogs I host in the Telegraph collective on the Mediajunkie server is The Philter, by Bill Cassel. Bill’s been blogging the Tour de France diligently, day by day.
Just sayin’.

You lose 300 tons and what do you get?

Please allow me to aggrandize myself, but my Monkey Vortex cohorts have scripted and produced a two-minute playlet called Sympathy for the W.
I was given a cowriting credit but that overstates the case. That is me on lead vocals, though. I know, I know. Don’t quit your day job. Cruel of you to say that to a freelancer.

The Invisible Cowgirl rides again

Susannah Breslin, whose now-defunct Reverse Cowgirl blog still hovers near the all-time top list here among Salon Bloggers has got a new website up at The Invisible Cowgirl.
Looks like her novel is about to come out. Congratulations, Susannah!
(Via Xeni at BoingBoing.)

The blog conference on the Well

A year or so ago, with the help of Jon Lebkowsky, I started an independent conference on the Well called blog.ind. Plenty of people on the Well are blog-savvy already of course (case in point: Cory Doctorow), but the information about blogging was scattered across a number of confs, and I also detected a bit of old school “where’s the beef?” resistance to the blog form, so I thought there was a need the conference would fill.
Apparently I was right, as we’ve got a lively active conference with new posts pretty much every day and a wide range of interesting topics, and the Well recently decided to turn our little indie conf into an official “Featured” conference on the Well.
As a perk of hosting, the Well now comps my membership, which is gratifying, given the time involved in monitoring and cultivating the conference, but the main effect of becoming Featured is that the blog conference now shows up in the official conference list and its a little easier to promote within the Well community (for instance, longtime blogger Rafe Coburn just dropped by today on noticing the new listing).
We’re going to look into mirroring the Well Bloggers group blog on the conf’s description page. We’ll probably get more Well bloggers onto the feed as well.

CIA, Bush in blog flap, says Onion

The Onion | CIA Asks Bush To Discontinue Blog:

On Saturday, Basham asked to pre-screen all blog activity before Bush posts it online.
Bush rejected Basham’s request and later that day wrote in his blog that “Some people who shall remain nameless apparently do not know there is such a thing as free speech in this country.”
Members of Bush’s re-election team have urged the president to exercise caution with his blog, perhaps because of posts like the one dated July 8, 2004: “Another long day of speeches and fundraisers. Met with all these phony media company execs. Had to promise them some bill next term and shake a lot of stupid hands, but they did bring in two or three million or so. Whatever. Karl keeps a list. I got big laughs during my speech, so I’m happy.”

Indeed.