Citizen Blogger (workshop plug)

On the March 15 cover of the New Scientist, at least seven men and two women in a crowd of onlookers aim their cellphones toward the scene of an event off-camera, a tragedy, accident or disaster, and by so doing they become news themselves, in “How 'citizen journalists' are transforming the news,” a useful introduction to blogs, podcasts mashing (up) and other mysteries by Dan Gillmor.

On July 12, 2008, the Geist Foundation and the SFU Writing and Publishing Program will host Taking It To the Net, a day of workshops for bloggers, YouTubers, podcasters and would-be pundits in the electronic world. This should be a great help to me, a print person who has failed so far to grasp the genre, to wield it for useful ends, even to provide the weekly, daily, hourly postings promised by the existence of a blog such as this one, an apparently benign repository of observation and comment passively waiting for the blogger to post and then post again, at any time of the day or night, and then again, etc. The most daunting aspect of blogging, for print people who are still trying to make the transition, is the disappearance of the fearless, graceful, intervening, life-saving editors who in the non-virtual world stand ready to throw themselves between the writer and the dreadful turnings in the underbrush, where dense thickets lie. Bloggers, then, have no one to blame but themselves: they go naked and alone into the dim flickering light.