As the weather will not change, Boris the Weather Profit recently had time to ask Jay Johnson a few questions.

DevelopingNews: Do you read any blogs? Why or why not? Which blogs do you read?

Jay Johnson: I do read a few blogs, mostly book related. Most of these are part of the litblog co-op. Specifically, I’ll check out Bookdwarf and the Elegant Variation once every couple of weeks. Bookslut every once in a greater while. The only blogs I subscribe to are Tom Haudricourt’s Brewer blog at the JSOnline, the cream city review blog, my book blog – The Inside Flap.

As I’ve turned into a primary junkie, I’ve spent far too many hours on one candidate’s blog. I also have become increasingly turned off by mainstream media sources and the spin they put on events and the narratives they choose to cover and/or create. The current digital news climate has made it very convenient to access other news sources that I wouldn’t have had easy access to previously. Thus, I’ve become a fan of the Huffington Post as a more established news source, but without a television arm. I’ve also started to find myself reading the Daily Kos and the Brad Blog, which are more typical blogs, in the sense that they aren’t simply news updates or stories that are called “blogs” by the networks.

This brings up a larger point – more sources, the reliability of media, the biases inherent in “telling” the news and the many interests that influence decision making and word choice – but I’ll duck those now.

DN: Was setting up the blog easy? Why or why not?Why did you choose the template you did?

JJ: It was “easy”, though slightly less familiar than the Blogger interface I use for my personal blog and my book blog. The cream city review blog does use wordpress, but our web editor designed the whole site to use a wordpress structure, so I had not used this web app previously.

Some of the specific differences b/w blogger and wordpress are the widget capabilities. One thing that I prefer in blogger is the “easy” editing available in text/hmtl boxes. I feel like I could make quicker and easier improvements in the right column if I was using Blogger. But, I’m always up for trying new templates. I do like the page/site features in wordpress and appreciate that its open source, whatever that might actually mean in the grand scheme of things that I don’t fully comprehend.

I chose this specific layout mainly for the black background. Black screen backgrounds use the least amount of energy (try using Blackle as a Google alternative – at the least read this page about Blackle, which has links to studies on how much energy would be saved if Google switched to a black background). I also like two-column design; three column puts too much pressure on me to keep a full set of plates spinning.

DN: When you write in your blog, how is your thinking about your writing different (is it?) from writing in other contexts?

As a classmate commented in her blog – sorry can’t remember who – the text window influences my method. I think I lose track of what I’ve written, even what my format or potential conceit may have been. WordPress is even smaller than Blogger. I try to be shorter; my emails trend to the lengthy. I spend considerable time on word choice, sentence and paragraph construction, punctuation, and tone in my short fiction. Academic work tends to be excitable and have a hint of subdued rambling. When composing a blog post with words, I try to be short, but not necessarily precise. More like a tour guide who tries to avoid blocking the scenery. I do allow digression when writing an opinion post. Have I finished answering this? (Scroll.) I do try to use a lot of links, pictures and video when appropriate, so words tend to become less important on my blog than in my writing that gets printed onto paper.