Apols (again) for the hiatus...

Perhaps I have blogger's block. Perhaps I am just a SlowBlogger (see below). Perhaps I don't want to be made to look a fool by events. In any case, I hope to get a few posts up in the next few days.

Thanks for your patience!

The bloggers who take it one post at a time
Jon Henley, The Guardian, Wednesday November 26 2008

There's SlowSex (apparently; first I'd heard of it), SlowCities, and SlowFood. Now, the New York Times reports, there is also Slow Blogging, which Todd Sieling, a Canadian technology consultant, defined in a manifesto as "a rejection of immediacy ... an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly". This is an idea that appeals to me. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in the mot juste. Words, as a rule, are better weighed before use, and too many blog posts - and particularly blog comments - are, well, not.

So I can but agree with Sieling when he proclaims that Slow Blogging is "speaking like it matters, like the pixels that give your words form are precious and rare"; represents "a willingness to remain silent amid the daily outrages and ecstasies that fill nothing more than single moments in time"; marks "the re-establishment of the machine as the agent of human expression, rather than its whip".

Like SlowFood, born in Italy of the conviction that fast food was as bad for local tradition as it was for your health, Slow Blogging is a response to the notion that fast blogging can be bad for both author and audience. For the time being, Slow Bloggers write mainly about subjects such as life in the countryside, philosophy and 19th-century literature (and, naturally, about the phenomenon of Slow Blogging). Amid what David D Perlmutter, author of Blogwars, calls the "many, loud and raucous voices" out there, on a myriad blogs, on MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and all the rest, they tend to be "coherent and responsible, intelligent and precise".

So let's hear it for all those who take the time to think, study and reflect before they post; who do not feel the need to slap the first thing that comes out of their head straight onto the web. People who refuse to update five times a day, or even once a week. People who value quality over quantity. People, in short, like Sieling - who is not in fact blogging at all any more, because no one was reading him. But that's the interweb for you.