Blog :: Random Rambles
December 2006
Horsey Blogging Community: Offshoot
Patricia (Experiments in Training Equines) and I have been talking a little about what/how re: horsey blogging community. I’m supposed to be emailing her back, but I’m not sure what I’ve got/where it has the potential to go. And since I like to make my confusion public, what better place to work it out than here?
Here’s what I do have: a program that could be used to develop a directory of horse blogs. You can see a tentative/beta version at http://horseblogs.halt-near-x.com.
I don’t think it’s very community minded, if by community we mean it’s going to encourage bloggers to post more on each others’ blogs, or perhaps band together around common goal(s), or check in on some forum-like site, or in any way get to know each other better. All the directory is… is a directory. And my impulse says to make it very general–to allow any horse-related blog to be listed, in the hopes that it would be a useful way to find horse-related blogs, no matter what aspect of horses/riding the bloggers wrote about.
Of course, if we ever did figure out what we mean by ‘community’, the script could easily be adapted to create a directory specific to that community. But for now, maybe it would be useful to have a general directory of any/all horse-related blogs. We have to find each other first, after all. Or something like that.
So… would it be useful?
The script is functional, people. I have the space and bandwidth to run it. All that’s stopping me from making it prettier than it is and perhaps a little more user-friendly is the question of whether it would be useful.
Would you, as a horsey blogger, add your site to a directory like this? Would you, as a horsey blog reader, use a site like this to find new blogs? Thoughts? Opinions? Reservations?
Those Secret Names
We decorated the house this week. Well, “decorated.” We moved the boxes from the shelves in the garage to a stack by the door. They aren’t in the house yet, but they will be soon. By Easter, for sure.
My mother’s informed me that this year she’s cleaning out all the old ornaments. The ones us kids made in kindergarten and such. I guess, after twenty-some years, it’s probably time to get some grown-up decorations. Ya think?
I honestly thought she’d consigned those ornaments to The Boxes years ago. You know The Boxes–they’re the place where parents keep all those old drawings and report cards and such. Somewhere in my box is a “newspaper” I wrote when I was, oh, nine or ten. I don’t remember what it was about, except that I did every section, down to the classifieds, and in the classifieds I had horse ads. So I could name horses, you see.
I remember that, because I’ve never grown out of the habit of naming horses I don’t own. I have whole mental lists of names:
Kvetch This, for a jumper. Sejanus, for a big, solid hunter. Bartleby, because it would make me laugh every time (don’t ask. There’s no reason). Gaius Valerius, whose barn name would be Tully (short for Catullus, because G.V.C. is a Roman poet I really like). Caligula’s Senator, just because I find that even more hilarious than Bartleby. Yes, I know: my sense of humor is very sad. And for mares? I’d name one Mnemosyne if I thought announcers could say it without butchering it. I want a mare named Sappho so I can breed her and have a filly named Sappho’s Lyric and another named Sapphic Meter and a colt named Sappho’s Legacy and… well, you get the point. And you thought breeding for color was irresponsible? Hee.
Plus, my other secret names: the ones I might actually use and guard more secretly than that one company guards their baked beans recipe.
I don’t know why I do this. Or why I never grew out of it. Especially since we know that what will actually happen is I’ll buy a horse whose been in the area and on the show circuit for so long that I couldn’t possibly change his/her show name. And it’s bad luck, of course, to change a barn name.
Making this whole naming habit especially pointless.
And yet… wouldn’t it be fun to do a dressage test on a mare named Terpsichore, after the Greek muse of choral dancing?
November 2006
Is there a horsey blogging community?
Don’t you find blogs absolutely fascinating? I mean in a theoretical or philosophical or some other sort of -ical way?
Blogger A has a blog. They post something interesting. Blogger B reads it and comments on it, leaving the link to their blog as well. Blogger A reads Blogger B’s blog, and leaves a comment there–maybe because they found Blogger B’s blog to be interesting, and maybe to be polite. It’s hard to tell, and so Blogger A and Blogger B enter into a weird courtship ritual, making careful advances onto each others’ blogs to see if they are welcome and, more importantly, if they can be Best Friends Forever. Or at least add each other to their blogrolls, which amounts to the same thing.
Meanwhile, Blogger C, who reads Blogger A’s blog quite often, saw the comment by Blogger B and thought Blogger B sounded interesting. Or maybe Blogger C was just bored and looking for new sites to read. Whatever–Blogger C visits Blogger B. Now, Blogger A and Blogger C already have each other on their blogrolls, but Blogger C and Blogger B have to go through the courting ritual to see if they will fit on each others’ blogrolls.
Eventually, you wind up with blogrolls that are reminiscent of webrings–many of the same sites linking to each other. This is not a bad thing–it means a group of bloggers are interested in the same topics (or different topics but similar writing styles, or some other common theme). It’s an informal sort of community. Unlike a webring, however, it isn’t a closed system or mutually inclusive–no one is requiring Blogger C to link to Blogger B, and Blogger C might decide not to. For whatever reason. Meanwhile, Blogger B can link to Blogger C all s/he wants. And Blogger B can link to Blogger D, too, even though no one else in this hypothetical community would dream of linking to Blogger D because Blogger D talks about building houses out of lint, and the rest of the community is interested in writing magnetic poetry. But Blogger D is Blogger’s B real friend, so…
What it all means is that IF there is a blogging community, it’s a fluid one. And I’d say–although I’m certainly not a sociology expert. Heck, I’m not even a sociology enthusiast. I’m surprised I can spell sociology–I’d say blogrolls do a fairly decent job of mimicking real-life friendship/aquaintanceship circles. In fact, I know there’s some sort of system in place to classify the various links on blogrolls (to designate whether a link is someone you know/have met, someone you’re related to, someone you work with, someone this, something that, etc). It’s much the same as acknowledging that you and CoWorker A both know CoWorker B because CoWorker B is, naturally, a CoWorker. But while you and CoWorker A might also know BowlingFiend D from the bowling league you both happened to join, neither of you have any interest in meeting CoWorker B’s great-aunt Edna. But CoWorker B loves Edna dearly, and you can’t fault him/her for that.
All of which leads me to my original question: Is there such a thing as A (i.e. one) horsey blogging community? Or are there simply pockets of horsey bloggers here and there on the web? And if there are only pockets here and there, should there be a larger horsey community, i.e. a place where we could find other horsey bloggers more easily? Or do we all have enough reading/writing to do as it is, without trying to keep up with everyone else as well?
Or to put the question another (and more personal) way–assuming anyone made it this far through the post: how important to YOU is the communal aspect of blogging? Do you even think about the relationships between blogs? If you write a blog, does it matter to you if anyone reads it? If you read blogs, do you comment or just watch from a distance? Why? (”Why” to any of those questions, really, although I imagine if you watch from a distance you’ll keep watching and won’t answer. Heh.)
And whether you read or write, do you find you’re reading and writing mostly horsey-themed stuff, or are you more ecclectic? Or do you find you might write mostly one thing (i.e. a horsey blog) but read more widely? Or vice versa? And, again, why?
Finally a break
I hate to keep harping on about the weather, but… there wasn’t anything else to talk about. We’re apparently in one of the coldest winters of the past fifteen years. For the past week, we were only a few degrees off the record low temperature. Our daily high temperatures have been lower than the average low temperature. I mean: we’ve been fifteen degrees below normal. For weeks.
The only exciting thing to happen to me in the past few weeks? My gloves froze to the wheelbarrow handle. You can see why I’m not posting much, right? It’s probably a relief–the posts would have been all the same. “Cold.” “Still cold.” “What is this ‘global warming’ thing of which you speak, and when is it going to show up?”
But today it hit nineteen degrees. Nineteen! Positive! Degrees! I didn’t even put a hat on, it felt so warm.
On the downside, the barn’s pipes froze. Normally we save this sort of excitement for the Jan/Feb cold snap, but we’re either getting it over with early this year, or else the Jan/Feb cold snap is going to be absolutely brutal. Given the weeks-long cold snap we just went through? I vote “brutal.” Sigh.
But that’s weeks away yet, and for now we’re getting a warm-up period and some snow. Yay!
Barn work is so much easier when I’m not bundled up like a giant marshmellow puff.
Warm Winter?
Back in August and September I remember the weatherman saying we were going to have a warmer than normal winter.
Yeah. Tell it to the single-degree temps we’re getting.
Every conversation I have lately seems to revolve around the question of how to keep warm. I even got into a serious debate about the best way to keep faces warm while working out at the barn–one girl likes ski masks, which I hate because you can’t hear as well. I wrap a scarf around my head, which looks dorky but is warm–until the scarf falls off, anyway. Someone else has this very cool tube-like thing that she just pulls over her head/around her neck and then can pull it up over her nose when she needs to. It’s elasticated, so it stays on her face–unlike my scarf. I’m not sure where she got it, but it’s genious.
Someone else asked me how I stayed warm while working, and I said layers. “Like sweaters and shirts?” she asked. Yes, I said. “And a pair of long johns, and my riding breeches, and then my jeans.” “You’re wearing three pairs of pants?” she asked. Well, yes. It’s warmer that way.
Everything at the barn is blurry now. By the time I get home I’m too cold and tired to think about it. Fortunately, it was almost 20 degrees today, which was positively warm compared to last week. Yippee! I’m thawing out! Maybe I’ll remember something more exciting than cold-weather clothes to blog about. Surely my life is not that boring?