Slow Blog Reborn
Slow Blog is a writing experiment that I started in 2006, then dropped, then picked up again in 2008. Its purpose is to bring creativity back to the human timescale, rather than allow it to be dictated by the ever-faster moving web.
Read the Slow Blog Manifesto, and say yes to fast only when you feel fast.
With the return of Slow Blog comes a dedication to thoughtfulness and words carefully chosen. Old writing will find a new home; new writing will happen when it happens, no less than once per season.
November 24th, 2008 at 2:37 am
I read the piece on “slow blogging” in the NY Times and found your compelling Manifesto. I’ve been thinking about “slow blogging” for some time — just didn’t have a word for it. It’s the antithesis of the HuffPo and others. As a physician, I’d love to embrace “slow medicine” and sometimes indulge the fantasy.
The NY Times piece inspired me to walk to my favourite hill yesterday and commune with a long dead Bard: http://www.cell2soul.typepad.com (see “Bare Ruined Choirs”) — Unfortunately, there were flurries on that site yesterday.
It’s no big accident that “Slow Blogging” emerged in B.C. Where time seems to move more slowly (at least at Tofino which was featured in your photos)
Cheers,
November 24th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Since I began posting on my blog for the first time this year (though I’ve owned the blog, hyffeinated.blogspot.com, for 3 years now), I’ve had to defend my modus operandi—what essentially is a slow blog—against what my blog-reader friends who frequent other sites were used to.
I’m not reactive–the urgency to have an opinion about the latest media obsession, or to publish for the sake of publishing just isn’t there. Nor do I fear the loss of readership by posting infrequently. While I hope that people read me out of their own interest for what or how I think/write, I can’t say that I would stop writing for lack of an (identifiable) audience.
Is it really possible to write for oneself, the way an artist might claim to create art for art’s sake? I have to say that writing, for me, is a form of catharsis. I invest myself in it fully, take risks in the hopes of improving my craft and my “voice,” and challenge the boundaries of my thinking and imagination.
I’m particularly intrigued by the form of the essay. Essays are meant to provoke, so an audience, real or imagined, is inherent to the form. So my notion of a “blog essay” isn’t so farfetched. It was just fascinating to learn that I hadn’t myself stumbled upon a new paradigm for blogging, and that someone—you—had actually thought to come up with a “Slow Blog Manifesto.” I’m glad you’ve taken up blogging again, and that, I suppose, I can now count myself as a member of this burgeoning slow blog movement. Cheers!
November 24th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
[...] the relatively new term “slow”, I must admit I had not heard about Todd Sieling and his Slow Blog Manifesto before reading the article. So now I pass the idea along to you [...]
November 25th, 2008 at 3:37 am
Enjoyed your thoughts with which I’m in agreement – over the couple of years, I feel I need to control technology’s impact on my creativity, such as it is, rather than allow the medium to dictate to me through the visualisation of imaginary deadlines, formats or audience. The downside is when one takes a break, the audience tends to peel off.
Nevertheless, I try to write when I feel like it, edit when I have time, and stick with what moves me, allowing myself to experiment with styles and methods of presentation.
All the best :)
November 25th, 2008 at 5:24 am
I came across this magnificent phrase “Slow Blogging” in Antony blog and became attracted to it immediately. I searched the term and found your simple yet beautifully written manifesto and decided to introduce the concept to Persian speaking bloggers by using your manifesto.
I have translated it into Persian (with a little bit adjustment to make it easier and nicer in Farsi):
http://bamdadi.com/2008/11/25/slow-blogging-manifesto/
Keep your slow and profound pace.
Thanks a lot and good luck.
Bamdad
November 25th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
[...] to do, with this blog. There’s a Slow Blog Manifesto written by Todd Sieling (who seems to be returning to his Slow Blog, despite what the NY Times article says) that I encourage anyone else who wants to [...]
November 26th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
I have struggled with how frequently I should post to my blog. Frequent posts would necessarily be short and probably disjointed, but they would definitely help to build a readership. Although part of my motivation for blogging is to work out ideas for myself and to write for its own sake, I do want to share with others, and get some feedback.
For the most part, however, I have opted to post longer, more coherent and carefully thought-out pieces (or so I believe). And so my pace is slow. One thing I would like to point out: when people use RSS-based blog readers (my favorite is Bloglines; another popular one is Google Reader), they can see when a blog is updated, which makes it easier to follow slow blogs.
Wonderful manifesto!
November 27th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Your blog was mentioned in the Guardian Newspaper and also in the Mail and Guardian (a South African newspaper) and I thought that I would come and see what it is all about. Great side and I like you manifesto on slow blogging.
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-11-26-the-bloggers-who-take-it-one-post-at-a-time
December 14th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
A friend mailed the NYT article describing your “slow blog manifesto”. I thank you for this. I like to let ideas simmer for a while to see what rises to the top before I post. I appreciate language and thoughtfulness. Sometimes I need to hear from others who think it’s ok to
b l o g s l o w l y.
Thanks, Risa
December 18th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Your slow blog manifesto is one of the most beautifully eloquent I have ever read.
After attending Northern Voice in both 2007 and 2008 (including Dave Olson’s wonderful ‘Eff Stats, Make Art!’ presentation (to which I should link, but you’ve probably already seen it, and I’d rather focus on what I’m trying to say here, and perhaps even avoid typos by not frenetically leaping from one web site to another), I became much more clear about why I blog. I realized the stats that mattered to me were which posts resonated with readers, and how long someone had spent on my site, not number of visitors or number of links. I’ve been neglecting my personal blog due to the pressure to create content for my corporate site instead (there are only so many words, after all).
Your slow reading post resonates with me too – I have been ashamed at the rate at which I consume books, concluding that it was a form of intellectual gluttony. With collections of short stories in particular, I have learned to ration myself to one a day – otherwise it becomes a blenderized stew. If I’m reading at 100 times the speed at which something was written, I’m probably not doing justice to it.
Will see if I can get someone to translate the manifesto into French.
December 18th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Thanks for the kind words, Ruth. I did see Dave’s presentation at Northern Voice (which does deserve a link, even if we both saw it: http://2008.northernvoice.ca/session/f-stats-make-art). Dave’s presentation was definitely one of the stand-out moments to the conference that year, for sure.
I like how you identified some stats that point more to making a connection with someone, and especially your note about the ratio of writing to reading time. I never read Finnegan’s Wake, but I remember a prof telling me that Joyce said it took him 15 years to write, and that it should take 15 minutes to read. From the few pages I actually worked through in class, I think he hit his goal.
If you’re going to Northern Voice this year, let’s look for each other and say hello.
December 29th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
I came across the slow blogging manifesto as I googled for “manifesto” to see if anyone else agrees with or has written on something similar to my “Anti-SEO manifesto”. I am happy that there are many who focus on content.
Though I blog everyday, very rarely it is on topic that is burning, and only because I have this inner urge to write. So I am not exactly a slow blogger but I am with you.
(Note that I am not saying my content is high quality. I am only saying that I try for high quality content.)
Cheers!
December 30th, 2008 at 9:11 am
I think there was, and still is, a strong anti-SEO streak in my feelings behind the Manifesto. It’s not that I find SEO in itself a bad practice, but it feels like it often takes over the direction of advice on blogging, and turns blogging itself into an SEO exercise which I find distasteful.
Beyond that, is SEO really something we should be trying to do ourselves? Isn’t that the job of the search engines themselves? There’s value in striving to make oneself comprehensible, but optimizing our creativity for findability seems like the wrong path to me.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Would love to meet up with you at NV09 – I’ll ask Mhairi Petrovic to introduce us.
My sneaking suspicion is that a lot of SEO optimization either masks or leads to bad writing, and we don’t need any more of that. Yes, that is the job of the search engines itself – just as creating an index for a manual has to include all the terms someone might look for in trying to get information (went through this at Christmas time with a Nikon user trying to help a Canon user to determine what an error message meant and how to fix it – the Nikon user naturally went to ‘troubleshooting’ in the Canon manual and found nothing – I went to ‘error messages’ and got the oh-so-surprising answer: turn the camera off and then turn it on again – could I have those five minutes of my life back, please?).
On another note: are you on Twitter? And if so, might I follow you? I’m @ruthseeley. :)