“Most men, it seems, still determine their worth as human beings by the number of zeros in their take-home pay. Some women buy into this; others don’t. Hence the latest flurry of stories and blogs about high-earning women insisting their husbands must make more than they do or lamenting that they can’t find men who make less and don’t care.”

Point taken but are there really “blogs” about “high-earning women insisting their husbands must make more than they do or lamenting that they can’t find men who make less and don’t care”? That is, there are entire websites consisting of reverse-chronological-order posts devoted to this subject?

Or are there posts along these lines on such web sites?

As the title says, Margin Notes is a blog, and this portion of the blog that you are reading right now is a blog post. Calling this article or entry or whatever other term you want to use a “blog” is like calling Connie Schultz’s column a “newspaper.”

But it’s happening more and more. Aside from being an imprecise term, I think there is also some faint derision in this usage, or at least a sort of encapsulated refusal to understand what a blog really is.

It’s like the mainstream, non-online media has finally accepted that they are going to sometimes have to talk about these things called “blogs,” and while they’ve finally gotten to the point where they can say the word without gagging on it, they’re sure not going to waste any time trying to understand any fine points about the medium.

After all, they’re counting on people realizing in another year or two how much of a waste of time blogs are, switching off the internet, and going back to reading stuff that really matters, like newspapers and magazines, and maybe even watching the five o’clock news.

Maybe they’re right. In the meantime, however, join me in making a stand for precision in language.

Repeat after me: The website thingy is a blog. The things on it are blog posts.

(Also, the past tense of “lead” is “led,” not “lead.”)

It is only in jest, of course, that I compare marriage to death. Hey, you can listen to Dylan Thomas read the actual poem here.

“The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.

I won’t be going over the cliff with them.”

The whole list is here.

I offer the following photographic evidence.

This is @Stokes:

@Stokes is really Sutton Stokes (me!), a fabulously successful freelance writer currently living in Missoula, MT. Here I am relaxing in my solarium.

This is @StokesUP:

@StokesUP is identified only as “Stokes” on his Twitter page. He is from some place he calls ÜT and is a photographer.

This is @STOKESGYLT:

@STOKESGYLT, of Harlem, goes by “Stokes the Editor” (Bio: “IM STOKES THE VIDEO EDITOR AND I WILL EDIT ANY VIDEO U BRING TO ME!!!!).

And this is @Stokez:

@Stokez is a high school student from Chicago.

I bring all of this up because of the relatively frequent inclusion of “@Stokes” in Tweets that are clearly not meant for me, such as:

RT @noel3leon: http://twitpic.com/q1l32 – @stokes do a shoot wit me d another girl lik this. please– let’s do it wit them girls u showed me

And:

@Stokes the Editor STOKESGYLT #whydogirls act like they dont suck dick

(Sorry for that, but I just wanted to give you the flavor, so to speak. Oh, and @STOKESGYLT, maybe it’s because they’re afraid you’ll talk tweet about them in a degrading manner.)

Tweets intended for @Stokez tend to be more wholesome, though I was once privy to a conversation among high school girls concerning what they had named their breasts.

Anyway, no hard feelings, just try to get it right in the future. And let’s hear it for @StokesUP, whose photography really seems to be getting off the ground, as indicated in the following direct Tweets he sent to user @kaylaanic0le:

im turnin that shit into a website. real soon

And:

yump jus bought my domain .

Way to go, Stokes! (BTW, I think the domain is here, though it’s just a placeholder page so far.)

“As a user of Twitter and Facebook status updates, I can tell you that they have come to matter to me in a way that I find surprising. Seeing a list of what all my friends, family, and acquaintances are up to helps me to feel connected to them. This is not just silly “Joe Blow is at the mall shopping for an iPhone” trivia either, though that is a crucial element of social currency. Important information can be conveyed, too. It was through a status update that I learned of an old friend’s work in freeing slaves in Calcutta, for example.”

Read the rest here. And here is the whale essay Brad mentions, which is worth a full read for its own sake.

If you are reading this on Facebook, then I successfully used a WordPress plugin named Wordbook to notify my Facebook profile of the latest post on my non-Facebook blog, Margin Notes. (If you’re reading this on www.marginnotes.net, well, never mind. If you don’t know what WordPress is, it’s basically the software that powers this web site.)

Wordbook was no problem to set up. Once I figured out that I needed to switch my server setting from PHP 4.x to PHP 5.x, it took about two seconds. I use Dreamhost, so this switch was dead easy, but of course your results may vary.

Update
Okay, so it looks like you wouldn’t be “reading this on Facebook” (or any more of this than just the title). I am checking to see if there are options that allow you to show more of the post.

There are such options. You have to go into Facebook’s “Application Settings,” and — in my case — select “applications granted special permissions” in order to be able to see Wordbook. Then you can “create a box,” so that your past blog posts show up (just the first line or two of each) in a box on your “boxes” tab. You can also set it to allow posts of different lengths. Looks like “short posts” just automatically excerpts the first 100 words or so of the post both on your profile wall page and on your friends’ “home” page, but doesn’t pay any attention to anything you might have put in the WordPress “excerpt” box. Oh, well, works for me.

Update to the update:
Never mind. Wordbook doesn’t post to the Facebook “home” page, just to a “box” on the users profile page. That makes it pretty useless for me, since I don’t think people are going to go to profile pages very regularly, especially with the new design. Instead, I’m using the native Facebook Notes feature, “import a blog.”

To do this yourself (as of March 16, 2009, the “new” format):

1. hover your mouse arrow above “settings” in the top bar of your Facebook page.
2. A small menu will open; click “application settings.”
3. In the list of applications, click “Notes” (not “edit settings”).
4. On the page that opens, you will see notes from your friends and a gray sidebar toward the right of the page. In that sidebar, toward the bottom, is the heading “Notes Settings.” Under that, you’ll find the start of the process for importing your blog posts as Facebook Notes.

One drawback for this method — as opposed to Wordbook — is that the posts won’t be readily identifiable as coming from an external blog. In other words, there is nothing to distinguish the Notes-imported blog post from a regular Note, composed entirely in Facebook.

This application won’t really drive traffic to your blog, either, if that’s important to you, because the post can be read in its entirety on Facebook. If you open the full post page on Facebook, by clicking on the headline of the post, you’ll see a link for “view original post,” which will take readers to your blog. But it seems likely most people won’t bother, since they can read the whole thing on Facebook.