Glide for the hills.

The Washington Post’s highly anticipated New Year’s list of what’s in and what’s out is in, and it gives out that, in 2009, slow blogging is in.

The list led me to evidence of something I wasn't aware of: a slow blogging movement.   The movement stakes out a narrow claim between freneticism and oblivion.  (I know it’s narrow because I’m always a step from walking off of my own claim in one direction or the other.)  Here’s some of that evidence: Todd’s manifesto at Slow Blog and an article on slow blogging at The New York Times.  Catch this post on the Oxford University Press blog by David Perlmutter, a journalism and mass communications professor:

Slow blogging also means coming back to the same issue with new information, months or even perhaps years later. It thus calls for a nonlinear interface, less like a journal page or a Facebook wall that flits by and then deposits week-old items into archives. Think about accretive knowledge, where the accretion is slow, sure and steady, not slapdash.

(If anyone finds such an interface off the shelf, let me know.  It would save me work.)

Writing about slow blogging leads to thoughts on slow reading, of course.  From the post “Slow” at So Many Books:

What would slow reading mean? Taking your time to squeeze out of a book everything it has to give you at that particular reading of it (assuming a re-read would give you additional gems).

And each of the above links sends me to other slow sites.  I’ll get to them later.

It was just over a year ago that John of JohnMiedema.ca (f.k.a. “Slow Reading”) and I discovered each other through a MetaFilter post entitled, “Slow Down.”  Maybe a trove a year is all I can handle.

Of course, it's the rare slow site that is as talkative as these or as mine about being slow.  Check out my passages column at right, including my blogroll, for lots of slow blogs in one sense of that term or another.

The idea of a slower blogosphere is catching on fast in the mainstream media. But slow sites hoping for publicity needn’t get too excited, I don’t think.  Most kids finding slow life under a rock stare for a moment and then return the rock, shutting out the garish sun, in favor of the next curiosity.

(My thanks to Dave at Via Negativa for yet another use of the snail picture, now sporting its fourth color.)

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Posted January 1, 2009.  Link to just this post.

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