Grinwout's Pt 2

The last time I tried something like this was the quite different Coachean Feed. Since I was trawling through debate-related articles anyhow, philosophical or social or cultural or whatever, I figured I’d pass them along to anyone in the community who was interested. I never bothered to check the stats, but I don’t think this was particularly popular except among a few people who got it, so to speak. Of course, as LD has moved along from resolutional concentration to positional concentration, all the articles in the world about, say, drones, wouldn’t matter much anymore. And certainly articles on rights and ethics and so forth would be mostly falling on deaf ears, or blind eyes, or whatever. So, I stopped.

While I was doing it, though, I tried various ways to popularize it, including mixing it up with the entries here on CL, which proved quite unpopular. The VCA clearly wanted their RSS feed stuff separate from my rantings and ravings. Okay, sez I. In any case, those postings never aspired to anything aside from pointers, that is, I found something, here it is if you’re interested. I added little or no comment, because they mostly needed no comment.

I created the DJ blog to serve a particular purpose, to support a web presence for my DJ products. But, alas, I’m an editor, not a marketer, with only editorial powers. I couldn’t develop a book-rich site beyond the content I created myself. I did create content, though, not much different from Grinwout’s. It was fostered by the belief that I could use the DJ brand to demonstrate that there was good stuff out there, and that we could find it for people. This was true, and again, I don’t know the stats, but I do know that I found myself suddenly on mailing lists and getting requests for stuff and being invited to screenings of obscure independent films. Whether or not the DJ appreciated what I was doing, the subjects I was writing about did. But my goal was never to garner some particular popularity for the blog beyond pointing out that we had a rich entertainment heritage that we wanted to share by applying our editorial skills to selecting articles on the web that we thought were of interest. A couple of months ago the DJ redesigned the website, and that was the end of me.

But I had gotten so wrapped up in doing this that I couldn’t stop. The thing is, the regular actions of the DJ are such that doing the blog was the perfect coffee break. It used totally different mental muscles, and actually helped keep me more focused when I was concentrating on the main event. And as I’ve said, I liked scouring RSS feeds for the good stuff, and I liked writing about the good stuff when I found it. Hence Grinwout’s was born.

Pt 3 next time.