Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Sailing Magazine

Tillerwoman doesn't "get" blogging. In fact she doesn't "get" most things invented after 1960 including personal computers, cellphones, the Internet, MP3 players and Laser sailing. She's an old-fashioned girl and I love her dearly for it. So when I try and explain to her what I am doing in writing this blog, the nearest analogy I can come up with is that it is a kind of on-line sailing magazine.

mag·a·zine n.
  1. A periodical containing a collection of articles, stories, pictures, or other features.

In the past few weeks the Proper Course magazine has carried a variety of articles, stories and pictures on sailing-related topics, some of which have generated heated letters to the editor in the form of comments. Here is a partial list of recent features...

Major Regatta Reports
Rohan Veal at the Moth Worlds
Women's Laser Radial World Championship
Laser North American Champion and Correction

Tillerman's Sailing Reports
Wednesday Night Sailing
Historic News
Newport Regatta

Sailing Clubs
Sunfish Fleet 17
Taplow Lake Sailing Club
Maidenhead Sailing Club
Burghfield Sailing Club

Editorials
World Championship
Intergalactic Championship
The Long Tail
Seven Reasons to Hate Laser Sailors

Videos
Wikiality
Surrender
Laser Slalom

Blogging about Blogging about Sailing
Dirty Little Secret
More Sailing Blogs

Other Vaguely Sailing Related News
Reality TV - Wife Swap
Reality TV - Survivor
Legal Report
New Political Party
A Message From President Bush

Songs and Poetry
The Ballad of Tillerman
Haiku
Clif Bars

Contests
Caption Contest - Catalina 37
Caption Contest - Lark

Recipes
Laser Beam Cocktail

How am I doing? Is this "magazine" carrying the variety of material that interests you? What's missing?

If I had to describe the blogs I read in terms of their nearest equivalent in conventional media I would have to say that there are newspapers, journals, instruction manuals, a comic book, a novel, sailing club newsletters, ships logs, photo albums... Most of them are more focused in style than my scatterbrain magazine format.

How would you describe your blog?

6 comments:

Sherry said...

I think my blog is like a pad of post-it notes. Stuff I write down when I think of it, which will probably land up in the bin when I'm having a good clean.

Or the notepad by the phone - you know the one that gets doodled on because you're distracted from what you're really supposed to be doing.

(BTW, great post: it really made me think about my blog on a level I haven't done before.)

EVK4 said...

First off, your blog should be described as the best sailing blog on the planet.

Mine is more of a diary. Or worse, a confessional. Or, probably more appropriately, a self-centered peek into a deranged sailor's view of himself. This translates into "diary of a madman" but Gogol already got that title.

Pat said...

Maybe mine's a mix of story-telling, news reporting, personal journal or diary, photo scrapbook, and the occasional odd opinion or essay.

Malinda777 said...

Somehow a flash of the Seven Dwarfs came to me. My blog is Happy, Grumpy, Sleepy, etc.

A mix of politics, news, humor, inspiration, whatever hits me in a moment. Somedays the posts are lame, somedays more brilliant.

My hubby doesn't get it either:) I tell him it's the place for my evil twin to play :)

Carol Anne said...

Oh, please don't flatter me by likening my blog to a novel. It more closely resembles the magazines in which Charles Dickens published his novels in serial format -- there's a bunch of other material here. Victorian women may have bought the magazine primarily because of the ongoing novel, but the magazine publishers had a lot more to offer.

Of course, I'm now facing one of Dickens' chronic problems -- I've run out of chapters, but the novel isn't over yet. And the readers are clamoring for more. So I guess I'm going to have to churn out some more plot -- something Dickens often found himself forced to do. (What's amazing with Dickens is that even when he was writing under duress, it was still quality stuff, albeit sometimes it was an extremely short chapter.)

Of course, I do have content other than the novel, and I hope my readers appreciate my slice-of-life vignettes and sailing adventures. I don't know that most Victorian housewives would understand sailing an Etchells or living in the wilderness among deer, elk, coyotes, and bobcats.

Anonymous said...

I'd say my blog is more like a personal journal than a magazine. It does have some news, some personal stories, some photos, and LOTS OF OPINION.

Btw, recommended you to a few sailors I recently met.

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