Today is a special day on Occams Typewriter. One year ago the site burst onto the blogosphere.
I had an idea to write a witty history of Occams Typewriter in the form of a Christmas carol, but I didn’t have enough wit. I couldn’t get past the first line:
O little town of Nature Ne-etwork, how still we see thy blogs.
So I scrapped that idea.
Then I thought of just writing a straight brief history. But I didn’t get much further:
We were a group of people thrown together by chance, a common interest in writing around science and a shared approach to discourse.
So I scrapped that idea.
Then I tried the last resort of the tired blogger – put up a word cloud from all my posts over the past 12 months, pretending that no-one’s ever thought of it before.
But that doesn’t seem to capture what I have been thinking about in the past 12 months. I thought the word cloud would have a stronger showing from ebooks, open access, journal publishing, and a few other things. I think the reason it doesn’t is because I haven’t been writing about everything I have been thinking about in the past 12 months.
So I gave up on that idea too.
There was a danger that this post would join that long list of half-finished posts – partly-realised ideas for posts that I never get round to polishing up enough to publish. But it’s not everyday that you can mark the anniversary of a blog platform so I really have to write something.
THe best I can do is to to express my gratitude to Occams Typewriter – to Richard for having the vision and setting it up, and to all the OT regulars and irregulars for making it what it is now.
As I understand my philosophy of obscure apocryphal academic jokes, the correct Oxbridge-approved answer to the question posed in your title:
is:
Haha, very good!
Once, fairly early in my blogging days, I got so frustrated at nothing I started out writing on panning out—to my satisfaction anyway—for my then daily posts, that I struck on the idea of writing about the things I didn’t write about – and told my readers so.
Oddly that post didn’t get many readers. Hmm.
Thing is, I know how you feel. This from a guy who, nominally, has 99 posts in ‘draft’ – mostly abandoned.
I wonder why research is counted twice, once horizontally and once vertically? 🙂
I empathize strongly with “99 posts in ‘draft’ – mostly abandoned”….
Grant – I think that is a good idea – writing short pieces on topics rather than closely-reasoned dissertations. I have found that sometimes those pieces seem to work better, in terms of audience response, than my longer pieces. But I get more satisfaction from the longer pieces, and that’s all that counts really!
I think the wordle program has not recognised the equivalence of upper and lower case, so “research” is different from “Research”. I did do a bit of tidying up, but missed that one.
So, who is Fletcher Harington? 😉
I think he probably played cricket for Middlesex in the 1940s. He was famous for his partnership with Charles Walter Morley 😉
O little town of Nature Ne-etwork, how still we see thy blogs.
I’m almost tempted to keep that going… I’ll give it some thought 🙂
Thanks for all your posts this year, Frank – in stark opposition to my own output, you are the master of quality over quantity!
Thanks Cath. But I envy the energy and vitality of your blog – you must be doing a few things right as you have such a large and loyal following.
Do not underestimate the power of the silly side 🙂
and thanks!
Above thy deep and dreamless spam…
(can’t think of a good way to end that line and still rhyme with “blogs”. “Bogs”? Surely we can work some toilet humor into it.)
Haha, love it.
Is ‘enfogs’ a word? I checked an online rhyming dictionary and found:
dogs
clogs
frogs
hogs
jogs
togs
I think ‘clogs’ might have some mileage in relation to spam, but it’s tricky to get it at the end of the line.
no more pho-o-tos of dogs?
I used to frequent an online forum where one well-liked and frequent contributor constantly mis-typed the word “post” as “psot”. Maybe this is one of those?
/uselesscommentmode
Yes, that is a word I am familiar with too. 😉 These days error correction software has mostly eliminated these simple errors from my typing. But predictive text on phones and ipads have taken mis-typing to a whole new level.
It’s been an honor to have you, Frank.
Thanks!
Photo of dog, recently. Not waiting for the bus to the station.
Henry – I fixed the photo link.
That is one beautiful dog!
Thanks Frank. That’s Canis secundus croxorum, who is quite a handful.