Retro-meta-blogging

Warning: navel-gazing metablogging ahead. Skip if you value your time.

Grrlscientist has suggested that I participate in a meme wherein one finds the 23rd post on one's blog and posts the 5th sentence. Although I am not a huge fan of blog-memes in general, I'm game for this one, mostly because it provides an excuse to clear out some other metablogging that's been sitting in my drafts for some time. So, to wit...

• First metablogging item: Here's the 23rd post on this blog, and as you can see it has only two sentences. Hey, that was easy. Perhaps it's slightly more interesting to note that this blog started out as a link blog --- basically, a way of cleaning out my web browser's enormous bookmark file --- as inspection of the first two weeks will reveal. My narcissistic love/hate relationship with my own inner voice soon prevailed, however, and I started writing longer, essaylike entries. And now that I've started using del.icio.us, I rarely post bare links at all. I suppose there's some kind of nugget of wisdom in there about the relationship between a medium of expression and its technological context and so on, but I'm too busy staring at my navel right now to conjure up anything thoughtful to say.

• Second metablogging item: Speaking of del.icio.us, you will notice that this blog's sidebar now contains not only a link to my del.icio.us page, but excerpts from one of my del.icio.us tags, specifically music-recommendations. This list is courtesy of the very cool, highly customizable linkrolls feature of del.icio.us, which I recommend heartily to anybody with both a website (bloggish or non-) and a del.icio.us account.

  (Incidentally, my music-recommendations are exactly that: music I recommend because I think it's truly excellent. If you feel like snooping around in all the music I've bought recently, then you might poke your nose into my musiclog. Obviously, when I buy music, it's because I enjoy it (yay for emusic.com and its streaming music samples), but not all such music is good enough that I'd single it out for public approval.)

  (Anybody curious about my reading habits may also wish to consider my booklog. Actually, I doubt anybody's curious about my reading habits, but I do think that people might want to copy this model of del.icio.us usage.)

• Third metablogging item: Wampum's posted a long list of potential nominees for the 2005 Koufax Awards' lefty blogs "Most Deserving of Wider Recognition" award. Almost 300 blogs! Hours of procrastination fodder! As it happens, this blog made the list. However, as my handful of regular readers know, I have a pretty ambivalent relationship to attention, so I'm not in any way encouraging people to nominate this blog for said award.

• Final metablogging item: I recently discovered, much to my amazement/chagrin, that BlogPulse's top 25 posts of 2005 included my post about Intelligent Design (though they got the permalink slightly wrong). Um, right. I have no clue what BlogPulse's criteria were, but I will say that spleen appears to sell. But then, I already knew that.