I dislike my recent quick-burst blogging style. I didn’t sit down and decide to write short posts all the time; it just happened. Maybe it’s a combination of being busy and still desiring to blog. Or maybe I wasn’t busy and I was just to lazy to engage in sustained writing. Whatever the reasoning behind it, I want to change to style where I write one long post once a day.

Every time I read a blog entry by Glenn Greenwald, I’m amazed at the way he weaves together facts to build a case. Those who work in pundit-world issue broad assertions based on their personal feelings and pre-existing ideological shackles. Greenwald supports his claims with evidence. For example, look at the plethora of polling data in this post on the low approval ratings of Congress. Yet I’m not drooling over his writing because it contains data. As stated above, I like the way he weaves together those facts — he is able to connect different pieces of information and construct a cohesive argument. His writings don’t feel like blog entries; they feel like essays. I’d rather be an essayist than a blogger, and so, I’d like to imitate him a bit more. (The online essayist has the powerful tool called the hyperlink, which does change things some what.)

I also have always enjoyed Lloyd’s weblog and he writes one entry a day. (Sometimes, he’ll update this same entry multiple times or address two different topics, but each day has one post.) Note that I wrote out “weblog” in full, instead of simply typing “blog.” That’s because it feels crude to call Lloyd’s weblog a mere “blog.” I can’t explain quite why I feel that the word is crude. There must be some element of unconscious synesthesia because the word’s texture feels crude in my mouth. In any case, I can’t apply such a crude moniker to Lloyd’s weblog because it is so much more than what normal people write. What Lloyd does goes beyond an online diary. His weblog a living, breathing manifestation of his self, his consciousness, his soul. Those who read his weblog are in no danger of a feeling of false intimacy because that really is a big piece of Lloyd on the internet.

I recently read Douglas Hofstadter’s book, I Am a Strange Loop. The small wikipedia entry for the book gives this quote: “In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.” Lloyd has a created one of these strange loops with his weblog, which contains an unusual number of “hunekers” (Hofstadter’s imaginary unit of soul) for an online entity composed of words, pictures, and links. Hofstadter talks about how an image of his wife’s self partly existed in his mind. A lower-resolution image of this sort exists in the mind of all the readers of his weblog.

Okay, that’s enough philosophical dissection of “the free radical.”

While I certainly don’t believe that making one post a day is sufficient for writing like Lloyd, it almost seems like a necessary condition. Always writing lots of little things is too scattered to make a living weblog. It’s hard to take those disparate pieces and turn them into a whole. Limiting myself to one post a day will force myself to focus on creating wholes rather than pieces. I will be able to create sustained arguments rather than isolated bits of snark.

I don’t like the isolated bits of snark because it doesn’t tell anyone (including myself) anything useful. For example, check out this entry from July:

I’m going to print out this article, The Pentagon Gets a Lesson From Madison Avenue, and put it in my sarcasm filing cabinet, under “Fucking Brilliant.”

Yes, fucking brilliant! What the military needs is re-branding in Iraq! If we label this lead balloon as a happy balloon, everyone will buy it!

What I wanted to say is that it’s bizarre to treat a real problem as if it were an image problem. Imagine a bunch of corrupt businessmen saying that their problem was that people perceived them as corrupt. Futhermore, I doubt the ad-men say anything useful that isn’t already explained more in-depth by books on counter-insurgency, or at least that’s the impression I have after having read Fiasco.

Now imagine if I explored what I just wrote above and added some research. Juxtapose that with the snark you see above and you know why I’m so disappointed in what I’ve been writing. This blog is worthless as a learning tool if I just write those bits and pieces; focusing on condescending dismissal enhances my biases, instead of teaching me new things.

So, it’s time to make my blog more thoughtful and more fact-full. I will do this by limiting myself to one blog entry a day (along with doing more research).