The New Yorker's Mia Mercado asks: What Is Writing and Does This Count as It?

• Writing is when you sit—fingertips hovering over your keyboard, cursor blinking on a fresh blank document—and open Twitter for the twenty-eighth time.

• You can tell that someone is a writer because she’ll have a pencil behind her ear, a Moleskine notebook in her hand, a pen behind her other ear, coffee on her breath and shirt, eyes that beg for your approval, and a Sharpie she’s somehow hidden in her hair.

I have only one laptop sticker, and am therefore not truly a writer. Read the rest

Kazakh blogger Lyubov Kalugina has been charged under Russia's Article 282, an "anti-extremism" law now being used by men who claim women sharing jokes and memes offend them. Via Quartz: Read the rest

Matt Webb (previously) is a "weeknoter." That means that once a week, he sits down and sums up all the things he's seen, done, learned and taken note of in the previous week, and makes the result public. Read the rest

Jason Kottke's blog turns 20 today (our online incarnation is a mere 18.3 years old, though we go back in print by another decade-plus); he celebrates with a lovely essay that recalls some of his thoughts in 2008, when he celebrated his tenth by speculating on whether he'd still be going in 2018, 2028 or 2038: "I had a personal realization recently: kottke.org isn’t so much a thing I’m making but a process I’m going through. A journey. A journey towards knowledge, discovery, empathy, connection, and a better way of seeing the world. Along the way, I’ve found myself and all of you. I feel so so so lucky to have had this opportunity." Read the rest

A popular French blogger was killed after a pressurized whipped cream dispenser exploded and struck her in the chest.

French media reported she had died of cardiac arrest after the incident, despite medical attention.

The popular fitness and travel figure was well-known in France, with some 55,000 Facebook fans and 154,000 followers on Instagram.

One of Ms Burger's family members took to Instagram, warning readers not to use the dispenser, saying that tens of thousands of "defective devices" remain in circulation.

The Chinese government's comment army generates nearly half a billion comments a year on apps and social networks, doing all it can to sway opinion in favor of the party. The vast message-managing operation spans the globe, reports Paul Mozur.

The common belief that they are paid 50 cents per post leads people in China to call them the Fifty Cent Party.

A new study says those people are closer to the government than previously thought.

The study, from researchers at Harvard University, says the legions of online commenters are not all freelancers paid by the post. In fact, it says that most are government employees, preaching the principles of the Chinese Communist Party on social media while carrying out their jobs in the local tax bureau or at a county government office.

The key technique is distraction — don't rebut, change the subject — all driven by a growing belief among authorities that direct censorship is too crude and obvious. Read the rest

Author John Biggs, who cranked 'em out for Techcrunch and Gizmodo, is quitting blogging. He writes about the things he's learned and earned generating 11,000 posts.

The first thing, of course, was the complete ruination of his health: he now "looks like a nervous beluga." But there are other perils—ambiguous ones, professional tradeoffs in the 3,300,000-word accumulation of mastery at something. You learn how to write fast and with dense precision, but it wrecks your ability to work long-form, to let a story unfold. You gain an uncanny awareness for what people want to read, but you can't remember what you want to read. You realize that while you're not really being read, authenticity works.

And you won't believe what happens next…

You learn that you can help people. In 2005 I wrote this post. It was about a WD-40 straw holder. It was a throwaway. A few months later I got a call. A nice lady was on the phone. She was trying to track me down. She said that the WD-40 straw holder post saved her company. She was able to sell hundreds of them and stay in business. I felt good for a minute and then wrote 16 more posts that day.

Say, I'll bet our readers will love this wonderful thing! I'll just spend 20 minutes meticulously creating this gif. Sure hope no one else saw this wonderful thing yet. ::rechecks scheduled posts:: Read the rest

Anil Dash has been at it for 15 years (slightly longer than me, but only slightly!) and his reflections on a decade and a half of blogging -- through major life changes from marriage to parenthood -- really chime with me, especially: Read the rest

Traveling? Ignoring relatives? Sitting alone at home? Whatever your situation over the next couple of weeks, the 50 blog posts chosen for the Open Laboratory 2013 collection of best science writing online can help. The stories will all be available in an ebook later next year, but you can read them all online now. Read the rest

"At the close of 1998, there were 23 known weblogs on the Internet. A year later there were tens of thousands. What changed?" [Mat Honan / Wired] Read the rest

In this video, blogger Duane Lester confronts the editor of a newspaper which plagiarized something he wrote. The best part is when the editor tries to physically intimidate him, a moment so inexplicable and hilarious I created a YouTube Infinite Loop of it for you.

There's a happy ending, though: he ultimately saw reason and paid Lester for the article.

How to Assert Copyright Over Your Work When It’s Been Plagiarized [All American Blogger via Jim Romenesko] Read the rest

Stephen Thompson's nonfiction project—publishing his 1976 high school journal as a blog and book—soon attracted the attention of a novelty book publisher. But he is instead kickstarting it, to ensure the right tone is kept: "my blog surprised me by really reaching out to a lot of people around the world who could relate, and I wanted to at least take a shot at raising the money to do it the way I saw it." Read the rest

If you live in the UK or Ireland, write about science, and have not been paid for that work, then you are eligible to apply for the Wellcome Trust's Science Writing Prize. The Prize is aimed at fostering high quality writing among science communicators who are either just starting their careers, or who write mainly as a hobby. Student journalists are eligible. So are people who blog about science. There are separate categories for professional scientists, and interested laypeople. The deadline is April 25. Read the rest

Matt Buchanan and John W. Herrman started a new tech blog, FWD. Early delights include Herrman on why we sound so dumb when we talk about communications; Buchanan on the ever-increasing importance of software; and Mike Hayes on Sam Spratt's fantastic Facebook Timeline banners. Also, did you know that the secret to successful consumer technology is how good it feels in the hand? Read the rest

Jeremiah Owyang writes that the golden age of blogging is over.

The reasons, in brief: many top blogs have sold out; staff turnover saw "star" voices slip off the radar; younger audiences like social networking more; and advertising revenue is increasingly hard to get at.

All the reasons given are true, but they're not reasons to believe that a golden age has passed. They're phenomena in their own right, each with its own story, and only the last presenting a barrier to entry for newcomers. Epochal change makes for an epic narrative, but all this adds up to a simpler truth: media is a tough game and you won't get far by copying what other people did years ago. Read the rest

I am very pleased to announce that two BoingBoing posts made it into The Open Laboratory 2012, an anthology of the best science writing on the Internet.

The first was written by Lee Billings, an excellent guest blogger we hosted back in February. Lee wrote a lot of great posts about Kepler and the hunt for exoplanets and deserves huge kudos. Incredible Journey: Can We Reach the Stars Without Breaking the Bank? is the one that will be in the anthology.

Today, the fastest humans on Earth and in history are three elderly Americans, all of whom Usain Bolt could demolish in a footrace. They're the astronauts of Apollo 10, who in 1969 re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at a velocity of 39,897 kph upon their return from the Moon. At that speed you could get from New York to Los Angeles in less than six minutes. Seven years after Apollo 10, we hurled a probe called Helios II into an orbit that sends it swinging blisteringly deep into the Sun's gravity well. At its point of closest approach, the probe travels at almost 253,000 kph—the fastest speed yet attained by a manmade object. The fastest outgoing object, Voyager I, launched the year after Helios II. It's now almost 17 billion kilometers away, and travels another 17 kilometers further away each and every second. If it were headed toward Alpha Centauri (it's not), it wouldn't arrive for more than 70,000 years. Even then, it wouldn't be able to slow down. Of the nearest 500 stars scattered like sand around our own, most would require hundreds of thousands of years (or more) to reach with current technology.