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Occasional blogging

As you can tell from the dates on my postings, I’m not the most active blogger in the universe. I have a life, OK? I don’t have time to spend my days opining about anything and everything under the sun. But get a load of this. Here’s a blog posting from books editor Martin Levin that has been parked on The Globe and Mail’s website for more than seven months. As you can tell from the comments, the Globe’s readers are wondering about this too. Does Levin have nothing else to say about “books, publishing and the world of literature”? Has he taken a leave of absence? Did he accept a package and leave the paper?

The Globe makes a point of saying that comments on its website are not the opinions of the paper; only the opinions of the commenters. But doesn’t anyone at the Globe realize that a blog posting that has been gathering dust since February should probably be moved off the front page of the paper’s online books section? When the Globe’s webmeisters are updating the page with the latest book reviews do they look at the Levin column and say, “Yep, this is one for the ages. This is a keeper”? Levin calls his blog, “Shelf Life.” There’s a certain irony there when you come to think about it.

If Levin’s column had appeared in the print edition of the Globe, it would long ago have been consigned to the recycling bins of the nation. But because it was posted online, it has been allowed to float around the blogosphere forever, like space junk. Is there a limit to the amount of stuff that can be dumped on the Internet before someone has to raise the red flag and say, “No more”? This should be an engaging topic of debate for the environmentalists of tomorrow.

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WordPress vs Blogger?

Members of a writers’ group I belong to have been touting the benefits of WordPress recently, saying it’s the best blogging software on the market. I get the sense, though, that they haven’t done much experimenting with other blogging applications. I happen to like Blogger because it links to Google, is user friendly, and has easily customizable templates. Has anyone tried both applications? How do they compare? Are there other, even better, applications that one might try?