is there any point in starting a blog?

I write for me. It keeps me sane.

The discovering new stuff angle is a good one. I think the blogosphere at the moment is in a slight danger of getting a bit homogenous - thirtysomething-plus men with an elegant turn of phrase and a couple of Coil records who know who Dizzee Rascal is. So writing from a position of naivety is probably a good thing right now.

As someone who used to run the monthly magazine deadline treadmill, I can confirm Tom is right about the positive effect regularly writing can have on the quality of your writing.

Colin, what's yr blog?

There isn't the feeling, even with the younger bloggers, of the fever of hearing something We've Never Heard Before and Don't Know How To Deal With. None of the What-The-Fuck-Is-This???!!!???!? adrenalin (the STRANGENESS of Lydon's voice, of Moroder's beats, of Shelley's two-note starway guitar solos, of Bowie's Low to this 13-year-old listener in '77). There's too much information out there; but then I fall into the Hornby It-Were-All-Fields-Round-Here trap if I say Back In Our Day three-quarters of the "canon" was unavailable/deleted and if you wanted to hear or find anything you had to dig deep in the ditch or the bargain bins to find them, so I won't. Or that now everything's known practically from the moment of birth.

Really we need more 13-year-olds starting blogs...

I want to see more of this crowd writing about something other than music.

Being part of a team blog has helped me get my act together to write more regularly. I eagerly await the promised improvement in the quality of my writing.

Maybe it is because I come from middle 'merica, but I can't fathom there are that many guys like this!

I know what's changed for me, but that wouldn't explain why so many other bloggers feel the same way.

In my next blog I do intend to write about music as little as possible and about "other things" as much as possible.

I do know what you mean though about thrills and excitement but this is kind of a fundamental problem with music writing - when I was 14 and heard something amazing my first impulse wasn't to try and catch it in words, that could only happen much later, after the big bang when my universe had 'cooled' so to speak, back then my impulse was to play it again, then grab a friend and play it to them, and so on.

bnw - There aren't many but every one of them will soon have a weblog! (What do I know, though, I don't even have the coil records!)

Xposts ahoy - yes to "other things", writing about things I don't know so much about is much more exciting for me (not for the readers probably but who knows). Is there really a wave of ennui across the blogosphere? I shall have to read more carefully. We are due one I think - the big second-wave blogs have been going for 6 months to a year now and experience suggests that's about the time things start to get a bit samey.

My teachers in '77 had vaguely uncool tastes for the time, but decidedly cool tastes from the viewpoint of now, and so I was able to talk about music more with them rather than with my schoolmates. For example my English teacher was a Krautrock nut, and I remember one Thursday morning our history teacher bringing in and playing Leonard Cohen's Songs Of Love And Hate and the class generally sniggering and cackling at its supposed unhipness, but something about "Avalanche" got through to me and I talked to Mr Armstrong about it/Cohen in general and started to check out what else he'd done.

i definitely sense this in my writing, Marcello. i'm not sure i've heard anything like that since I was 18 though. that's a whole 3 years without any groundswell of excitement. i don't know if this is music's fault or my fault in just being to lazy to get worked up or if my nerves are dull or what. most of my music listening is plaisir rather than jouissance. hm. i'm reading this thread carefully though.

my fingers still smell of lamb!

perhaps something that will happen is people will start to see blogs as a means to something, a route somewhere else: whereas maybe a lot of the excitement and energy of earlier this year was related to people feeling that blogs were the end-point, a result. i dunno.

one thing i think should definitely happen more is performative stuff (did someone mention this upthread?). more adopting of personae a la heronbone. more fights picked. more lies. more fiction. more exploitation of anonymity.

Nathalie I've re-sent the invite to the skynet address and I've sent a new one to stevienixed too - will those reach you??

if you do it AT ONCE it's fab: if it piles up even a bit then it will prob accumulate until actual real rats are arriving with hand-luggage from all points of the compass

yeah i know what you mean,but as i kind of said upthread,i will be writing anyway,its more that i had assumed a blog would be the best way of going about it,i was worried that it would seem kind of foolish to start yet another blog,and that maybe i should just keep it to myself (obviously i could just start a blog and keep it to myself,but i feel one of the advantages of a blog is that it doesn't exist in a vacuum,that the opportunity for feedback/arguement/discussion etc is there,wheras it wouldn't be if i was just writing in a copybook kept in my bag and not showing it to anyone (which is what i have been doing,but not as much as i would like to)

I found I ran out of things to say on my own blog and felt there was no point in updating it after a while, particularly when I had the option of writing on NYLPM to a way bigger audience and in a semi-enforced style (ie less room for laziness, at least in my head).

This thing about 13 year olds or enthusiasm sounds fantastic but I've often felt like this about music, I do pretty much every time I hear a new great record, like the Bangalter/Falcon thing recently, but it isn't necessarily conducive to brilliant writing I'm afraid. There's only so many ways to express that kind of excitement and most of them don't involve sitting at my computer.

My blog is a personal journal, but it's not a diary. I use it to write things I feel like telling people. I don't splurge feelings the way I do in my private diary.

If you want to practice writing, then doing it in public is a very good idea purely for the feedback you get. I've got a feeling - based on the blogs I read - that a blog is made up of both its writer(s) and its audience. The feedback loop that you get is very important in determining the character of the site, and is a big influence on what I decide to write on mine.

Because someone did find it, read it and get in touch with me, and now we're together because of it :-)

Yay!

Somewhat similarly, I met Jake (my good friend, my bass player, Ned and db's old roommate) through finding his record label's website online and thinking it was cool -- but it was reading his extensive diaryblog that pushed it over the edge and got me past my shyness/sloth to actually send him an e-mail saying that I thought it was ridiculous that we lived 20 blocks apart and had very similar interests but had never met.

So you built a robot to go out in public and you could stay at home.

Yeah, um, unfortunately the robot turned out to be a finely honed killing machine. So we don't like to talk about it.

What the hell are you talking about, I'd be celebrating this to the skies.

invisibleleadsoup.blogspot.com

plz bitch about CSS follies and etc. as the next couple of days pass. I'll be working on the template for a bit more, then next Tuesday or early Wedensday my first real post goes up. After that, see you guys later, I'm going to go be famous for my lovely opinions.

Thanks,

I'm thinking about it, readers, I'm thinking about it...