As the title of my upcom­ing book is The Great­est Blog­ger in the World I have started to be asked ques­tions like, ‘Do you think you’re the great­est blog­ger in the world?’ and ‘What’s it like hav­ing a blog and talk­ing online?’ Firstly, I am not, will never be, don’t want to be, can’t think of any­thing worse than being known as the great­est blog­ger in the world. So, no. And sec­ondly, at the risk of talk­ing about talk­ing and never say­ing any­thing new or real I’d like to talk about talk­ing. They say that there are five lev­els of conversation:

1. The Weather.

“It’s start­ing to look like rain”.

2. A topic.

“I catch rain in my water tank.”

“Water tanks are cool.”

“Yeah, way cool.”

3. Ener­getic conversations.

“I can’t believe our fathers both sold water tanks back in the 60s!”

“Life was pretty strange with a water tank sales­man for a dad!”

“Tell about it.”

“Hahaha.”

4. Mean­ing­ful

“So I just don’t know any­more if my father loved me then or loves me now.”

“All because of the tanks?”

5. Mean­ing of life-ful

“Yeah, all because of the tanks. Is this how life is sup­posed to be? I feel like I’m doing it all wrong. Or maybe Dad did it all wrong.”

“I think it all depends on how you look at it. Is the water tank of your life half-full or half-empty?”

As more and more online social net­work­ing sites are used (and more and more arti­cles called ‘So What Is This Twit­ter Thing Any­way?’ get pub­lished in week­end news­pa­pers) eti­quettes and ‘appro­pri­ate behav­iours’ for these sites become more evi­dent. For exam­ple, it’s not really cool to post some­thing like ‘Andrew just got dumped and is very sad. I hate you Rebecca!’ on Face­book or Twit­ter. These sites are for flip­pancy, pho­tos and gen­eral news and info. How­ever this is not to say that all types of con­ver­sa­tions can­not hap­pen online (I lose 2 writ­ing points here for my dou­ble neg­a­tive). Which brings me to my Five Avenues of Online Conversations:

1. The weather

The weather and related small talk can hap­pen pretty much any­where online. Although bor­ing con­ver­sa­tions may raise ires if you’re IM–ing.

2. A topic

Per­fect for book­mark­ing — Digg, deli­cious, etc as well as the Twitterbook.

3. Ener­getic conversations.

You could do these on Face­book or Twit­ter but peo­ple are going to get annoyed at see­ing a con­ver­sa­tion going back and forth between you and your friend. You’ll call it ener­getic, they’ll call it inane. Email or Direct Mes­sage it the way to do Level 3. Also, blogging.

4. Mean­ing­ful

Email or Direct Mes­sage, but really IM is the best course for this. And any insight­ful blogging.

5. Mean­ing of life-ful

IM. It’s the only way to ‘talk deep’ online.

My lists and rant­i­ngs are, in them­selves, flip­pant and not to be taken too seri­ously. The only real impor­tant thing to say is that any type of con­ver­sa­tion can take place online. Talk­ing online is not a sixth, dif­fer­ent level of con­vers­ing. Unless you think that shar­ing links to silly things is a supe­rior level of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that can ONLY take place online and is there­fore a sixth (and quite beau­ti­ful) level of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in itself.

So it turns out that April is Blog Every Day April. It’s a fun lil band­wagon that I have decided to jump onto. New York YA writer Mau­reen John­son is head­ing up the BEDA (I love a good acronym) action and blog­gers around the world are tak­ing up the chal­lenge, because, really, who can resist a silly online gimmick?

Per­son­ally, I hope BED will bring some kind of reg­u­lar­ity and struc­ture to my life. I just  hope I can see the month out. Unlike the fail­ures that were Do Push Ups Every Morn­ing March and Stop Eat­ing Apples That Don’t Belong To Me Feb­ru­ary.

While the world sali­vates over the new pics of the Where the Wild Things Are movie I thought I would share an illus­tra­tion of one of the char­ac­ters from my upcom­ing book The Great­est Blog­ger in the World.

Let me intro­duce you to Bar­code. This lit­tle guy (as drawn by the clever Gre­gory Bald­win) plays the impor­tant role of ‘fam­ily duck’ in the book. He also makes an illus­tra­tive apper­ance at the start of each of the book’s chap­ters too.  Good job Bar­code. And nice beak-clenching-newspaper skills too.

I was raised in an outer sub­urb of Mel­bourne called Wat­so­nia. The only real thing of note in Wat­so­nia is the Simp­son Army Bar­racks which began life as the Wat­so­nia Mil­i­tary Camp in WWII. Appar­ently there’s lots of com­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment at the Army Bar­racks which means that if Aus­tralia is ever invaded Wat­so­nia would be one of the first places likely to be bombed. At least that’s what I think I heard some kid at school say once.

Apart from the Army Bar­racks and the Wat­so­nia Library — be kind to your local librar­ian — there’s not much else hap­pen­ing in Wat­so­nia. Although the sight of Jenny Mack­lin MP cam­paign­ing out­side the Wat­so­nia Bake­house dur­ing elec­tion times is worth vis­it­ing town for. If Wat­so­nia was my bio­log­i­cal father then I could be said to have Daddy Issues.

They say that Aus­tralians have a love-hate rela­tion­ship with the ‘burbs and  I have a love-hate-lust-domestic vio­lence rela­tion­ship with Wat­so­nia. And when I vis­ited the place this week­end past I was con­fronted by the sight of an aban­doned TV sit­ting on top of a boul­der, around the cor­ner from the Wat­so­nia BP.

It was sooo Wat­so­nia. I loved and hated and lusted for and wanted to beat that TV on the rock. But I should stop rag­ging on my home­town now. Thankyou blog for the ther­apy times. See you next session.

The good ol’ author pic is the ire of almost all authors. Often found on the back sleeve of a book, it’s easy to see why the com­mon author treats their back-of-the-book pic with gen­eral dis­dain. There’s a rea­son movie direc­tors don’t flash their por­taits onto the big screen at the end of their movies. I mean, would the final scene of Thelma & Louise have the same impact if it was fol­lowed by this?

But to undi­gress (not an offi­cial word) my label mate at Hardie Grant Egmont, author Chris Mor­phew, recently blogged about his own author pics and pro­ceeded to label one of my author pics as a ‘Clas­sic Mope’.

I think he’s prob­a­bly right. Some other favourite clas­sic author poses include:

The Guru Pose.

The ‘I’m so doey-eyed how could you not believe me?’ Pose.

And the ‘I signed a movie con­tract and hired a styl­ist” Pose.

If a clas­sic author pose can­not be struck the next best way to show your­self as an author is to turn the author photo black and white.

Noth­ing says ‘author’ more than grayscal­ing the author pic.

And here’s my label-mate Chris Mor­phew author-ised.

Although I guess there are some peo­ple who are just never going to look like authors.