Blog glossary
One last thing for tonight: in my peregrinations earlier, I chanced across the Samizdata blog glossary. I went there to find out what "fisking" is, 'cause I've heard the term several times in recent weeks; turns out it means to tear something apart point by point, in the grand old tradition of Usenet and, to some extent, email.
But what really intrigued me about that glossary was how much you could learn about blogging culture from reading it. And I'm not just talking about the explicit statements about blogging culture (the way that you can learn about geek culture from the Jargon File's explicit statements about it); I'm talking about being able to see things about the culture based on the terminology and the way the definitions are presented. It's a different aspect of blog culture than I'm familiar with; most of what I see are "journal blogs," which I suspect the glossary-creators are a little scornful of.
You can also tell something about the politics of the people who put the glossary together, based on such ~delightful~ tidbits as the two references to Noam Chomsky being an "idiotarian." ~Now there's a rationalist argument.~ (An idiotarian, the glossary helpfully explains, is one whose political values are based on "a fundamentally irrational ... world-view"; "[a]n advocate of irrationalist and subjectivist values.") The glossary attempts to explain the uses of such terms without indicating whether the glossary-creators agree or disagree with the uses, but over the course of the glossary you get a pretty strong sense that the people who made it aren't exactly what you'd call leftists. A glance at the top page confirms that they're libertarians.
My journal falls into several of the categories they mention, but doesn't fit neatly into any one of them. Apparently I have a linguajournaltechpundit blog.