My good buddy Doc Searls says I’m
a warblogger, not a techblogger. Truth is I’ve never thought of
myself either way. I had only the vaguest notion what a `warblogger’
is until I followed his links to the definitional discussion. I write
stuff related to 9/11 because it’s one of the definining events of our
day, but I didn’t start blogging particularly because I wanted to
comment on the war. Y’all may have noticed that I write about sex and
guns a lot. Nothing about witchcraft yet, but give it time… :-)
The blogotypological distinction that makes the most
sense to me is “thinker” vs. “linker”. I know which of those
camps I’m in. I’m a thinker, an essayist. I’d rather write about
my original thinking than reflect or index other peoples’ words.
VodkaPundit was right on when he compared me to Steve Den Beste over at U.S.S. Clueless. Glenn Reynolds is, of course, the king of the linkers (though
he goes into thinker mode off-blog).
I’d actually say there’s a
third setting on this switch; “diarist”, someone who blogs
essentially as a public journal. Like Den Beste, I’m not a diarist; you wouldn’t find ramblings about my beagle or my infant daughter here even if I had either.
My personal life appears in this blog only insofar as it’s the
frame in which my ideas happen. I can imagine writing personal journalism, but it’s not my default style.
Asparagirl, on
the other hand, is a good paradigmatic example of a diarist; her ideas are embedded in a narrative of her life.
Of course, people do mix modes. James Lileks is
a diarist/thinker, or thinker/diarist, and
Andrew Sullivan
oscillates among all three modes in a (dare I say it?)
gaily promiscuous fashion. But most bloggers seem to
have a base style that’s one of these three, from which they
may make occasional excursions but to which they
inevitably return.
As Doc points out, I’m not a techblogger either. Technology
evangelism is what I do off-blog; Armed and
Dangerous is for the writing that doesn’t fit that box, just
as a lot of other bloggers treat the medium as an outlet for
whatever is not their day job. Maybe that’s another
distinction we need; `problogger’ (someone like Jonah Goldberg
whose blogging is a seamless extension of his day job) versus `playblogger’ (someone who blogs to let off steam that their day-job channels don’t have a good vent for).
While the best I can say about the term `warblogger’ is that
it’s not completely useless, `techblogger’ seems to me to be a
category that’s likely to survive as the medium matures. So
does the thinker/linker/diarist distinction, and the playblogger/problogger flag bit.
I’ll end with the obligatory abjurgation not to take any such
terminology too seriously. We’re all writers, a prickly bunch,
and we’re all to some degree category-busters by nature or
we wouldn’t be here in the infancy of a new medium at all. Still…I suspect that more definite blogotypes will emerge as people explore the space of available styles and discover which ones
are most effective at communication.