portrait of the blogger as a young man.
May 3, 2000 4:38 PM   Subscribe

portrait of the blogger as a young man.
posted by palegirl (13 comments total)
 
Are articles like this good for the ego of the guy who once ran a survey on his site asking which picture of him was the best?
posted by Mo Nickels at 5:22 PM on May 3, 2000


Well you've got to have something going for you if you Blog as a job, hobby, and life! The article implied that Barger lies in bed, surfs the web, and blogs all day and all night long. Sure I like a good weblog, but that seems a little over the top. With all that time on his hands, the final product is pretty disappointing!
posted by chaz at 5:24 PM on May 3, 2000


No, they're saying that now he works on the Joyce stuff much more than the log. I remember Robot Wisdom's halcyon days, it was pretty fine.
posted by EngineBeak at 5:34 PM on May 3, 2000


And I think it's good that he sincerely refuses to 'submit to the man' & does his own thing. Jorn's very very different, and easy to rip on him, but have to admire a willful & going-all-the-way true individual.

PS chaz I'm completely drunk so give me some cred here.
posted by EngineBeak at 5:39 PM on May 3, 2000


Well, since he went on his now-months-long "hiatus" I've dropped RW from my daily rounds. Sometimes it seems he only adds one or two headlines a day, which is about average for a weblog, and chiefly from familiar sources to his readers.

I respect what he is capable of doing, although I have other issues with him (notably his prickliness, which has impacted two situations most here should have some awareness of). If he would return to the RW output of old I'm sure he would continue to amaze me with what he finds.

The only anomaly here, really, is that the article comes at a time when his blog has become more quiet than I ever remember it. Coasting on rep?
posted by dhartung at 6:12 PM on May 3, 2000


Heh---- Nietzsche says (Beyond Good and Evil: 74) "A man with genius is unendurable if he does not also possess at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness." Not to say that, you know... but it seems relevant.
posted by EngineBeak at 6:27 PM on May 3, 2000


beaker you get all the cred... I'm sippin on some fine red wine at the moment myself. RW was the first log I started reading, way back in the summer of 98, so I'm well aware of what he's capable of. But it kind of surprised me that RW is his only project besides the radio show. I personally know webloggers who work a full time job, plus freelance, plus write for other sites, plus are in a long-term relationship, and still come up with just as many links, with commentary. Although I like to read Joyce, I've never given his other pages more than a cursory look, so maybe that's where his energy really is these days. Does anyone know of any other webloggers who pretty much work on their site all day?
posted by chaz at 6:44 PM on May 3, 2000


riothero?
posted by palegirl at 6:59 PM on May 3, 2000


Someday Mark is gonna grow up and get a job, and then what are we gonna do?
posted by harmful at 7:30 PM on May 3, 2000


maybe it will be the same kind of ending as "Edtv''....
posted by Jeremy at 8:06 PM on May 3, 2000


>> from the article:
"I had a family for a while," says Barger, "but that kind of dissolved. I found that I just spent much more time thinking about the flame wars that I was in than the people that I hung out with." <<

This is sad.
posted by the webmistress at 9:29 PM on May 3, 2000


It's interesting that Julian Dibbell's the one writing the piece. He's made a name for himself, chasing the zeitgeist: "My Tiny Life" about LambdaMOO back in the days when it was the representative example of online culture evolving, and now the weblog community. Ironically, I get the feeling that this piece says more about the watering-down of the weblog nation: once Feed reports on something, it's obviously past its best. It comes across a testament to Jorn's weariness, and of the growing sense that a rapidly-expanding "blog community" is starting to feel like too little butter spread across too much bread.
posted by holgate at 2:42 AM on May 4, 2000


Being a newbie to both the web and (a bit longer) to James Joyce I found RW on my first night online and I owe Jorn a great debt.
He may not be the world's most interesting or prolific blogger nor is his site the best organized using all the latest software or whatever but you can't help but be taken in by the guy's passion and he sure does put a lot of energy into it.
If it wasn't for Jorn I would be like most pc-illiterates and have been introduced to the internet through the multinational portals and have just stayed near corporate home.
He has been devoting a lot of his time to the Joycean stuff - he has the best of the billions of Joyce sites around so I am definitely one satisfied customer.
And it was through him that I found Metafilter and the many other weblogs I now religiously visit.
Leave him happily mad and visit him or not.
posted by peacay at 6:44 AM on May 9, 2000


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