September 2007 Archives

• The Laugh Track - 4 comments
• How Did You Learn to Type? - 97 comments
• Writers' Favorite Fonts - 42 comments
• The "Tact Filter" - 18 comments (I was sort of amused/surprised by the comments about MBTI...I guess I just assumed that everybody know about that stuff and found this sort of a fun [over]simplification)
• Live Online Today: Layer Tennis! - 2 comments

Yeah, so that post last week with 90 comments? Now it has 186. So pleasing to me.

Thought on blogging: it's getting both interesting and tiring -- I think these things are related. What I mean is, I finally think I understand what I can do with the mental_floss blog -- I can pose interesting experiential questions to this audience to trigger a personal interaction. The best examples so far are asking about authors you've "finished" last week, this week's one song on repeat, the post a while back about a borrowed cat. The 120 Minutes post brought out some of that connection for people of a certain demographic. In general I think my contribution to this blog will be in finding and relating these sort of conversation-starting questions -- this is a bit different from the (very well done) "list of things" or "where are they now" posts that are the core of the blog, but I think it's my personal brand of content. In some ways, the novel writing is seeking a similar connection, it's just not as direct or immediate.

Having said all that, I don't think I can figure out a new compelling question every day (nor will the audience really want to engage that much, I don't think), and filling in all the days takes some doing. But...so far, so good.

• A Series of Digressions: Storytime - 4 comments, and genuinely a fun thing to watch
• Keyboard + Dishwasher = It Works! - 11 comments
• Listening to One Song on Repeat - 59 comments
• Visualizing Movie Dialogue - 8 comments, mainly related to layout problems
• Archives: The New York Times and Siskel, Ebert, and Roeper - not really any comments, so much

This week marks my first 90-comment post! Woo.

• R.I.P., Alex the African Grey Parrot - 1 comment
• Help Find Steve Fossett - 22 comments, including (a bit unexpectedly) a bunch of "screw that rich daredevil" stuff
• Gotta Read 'Em All - 90 comments; most comments yet for me!
• Advanced Tetris Gameplay - 4 comments
• Documentaries I Like: Cosmos - 4 comments

A short holiday week!

• The Bizarre World of Ferrofluid - 5 comments
• Visualizing Consumerism - ooh snap, no comments!
• More "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks - 29 comments, including a mini nerd fight about whether frequently-updated site was an example of improper punctuation
• The Forgotten Lens: 50mm - 10 comments

• Square America - 9 comments
• 120 Minutes Archive - 14 comments, and a great way to spend an afternoon
• Kubrick's Archive - 1 comment (but apparently I'm somebody's favorite blogger!)
• Faceball - 2 comments
• The Kriegsmann Files - Found Publicity Photos - 5 comments