Vacuum

What you're likely to find here

I treat this weblog as an unpolished open notebook, inspired by RFC 3 from 1969:

Steve Crocker, Internet Request for Comments 3, from 1969: "There is a natural hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this inhibition."

If you are looking for some more evidence of focus and polish, I've moved some of the writing that I've done on some topics to their own weblogs. See these:

• Blogger's Secret, a sporadically active weblog about writing and expertise
• FOIA Coordinator, a weekly weblog about the Freedom of Information Act
• Superpatron, a mostly dormant but still interesting blog about libraries and books
• A Pinterest board for maps, which sometimes show up in this blog's maps category

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Edward Vielmetti, Ann Arbor MI

edward.vielmetti@gmail.com

I'm not "producing content", I'm writing

For this blog, at least, I want to make it very clear: I'm not "producing content", I'm writing. This may be in order to call out attention to the work of a friend or a client, it may be to scratch some particular itch for words that need to be said, and it may be because someone else's interests dovetail with mine. Generally I try to quote enough of what other people say to be fair to them, and to tell a part of a story that you can find only by chasing through the network looking to connect ideas together at their edges.

One of the peculiar characteristics of writing for yourself and not just creating copy is that you end up finding things from your past that you still own enough to re-edit and rework as needed. A recent discussion on Twitter about paw paws helped me unearth a 2008 collection of scrapbook entries about the fruit, its names, and how it tastes. If I had produced this content for an employer (or an ex-employer), it would be long since frozen and old; but because it's just my writing, I can go back and make it better four years later.

I've been happy with Typepad for a long time. Recently, some of the management changes at the organization that runs it have led to some changes in the marketing around the service, so that the relatively few old-school bloggers like me still on the system seem less and less to be the target audience, in favor of professional media people who have a certain number of words of content that they are obligated to produce before they move to the next task. I guess I can only be hopeful that the sorts of tools that are needed to crank out content on the job can also be used for old fashioned blogging where the deadlines are less definite and the goals more ambiguous.

- 30 -

Thanks to Dinah Sanders (@metagrrrl) for the Typepad commentary. The paw paw discussion came and went on Twitter, as twitter things tend to do, without leaving too much of an obvious trace; Micki Maynard and Dave Askins were at the center of it. I tried to avoid bringing in any mention of "discontent", and failed.

Disclaimer: nothing to disclaim at this time.

About ...

This is the weblog of Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's part of a continuous stream of writing online that started for the Internet in 1985, and that showed up here on Typepad in 2003 or so.

I have been interested in a great many things, which all have had something to do one way or the other with networks and internetworks at all levels - technical, political, social, biological, intellectual and commercial. Often, the only way to make sense of something is to write about it, and the log reflects that continuous stream of curiousity much more so than any desire to "publish".

Quite a bit of this writing has been about Ann Arbor, and for a year and a half I wrote a daily column for  AnnArbor.com that was published online. That was a fascinating job, and it's over; I'm currently seeking a new full-time position. You can see my online resume on LinkedIn, which makes some approximation of what a career in the Internet looks like. 

I took this weblog offline for a few months in early 2011 so that I could read through enough of it to do an edit on some of the categorization, add back in some old materials that deserved to be preserved, and unpublish a handful of mostly unread works that needed further editing. The editing job is woefully lacking in most blogging, and the opportunity to go offline for a bit and do a cleanup job is quite welcomed.