Blogs Will Live + Female Characters and Likability

Hi everyone!

I hope you are having a wonderful Sunday so far and that the weather around you is as warm and delightful as it is around me! I read outside for several hours in the sunshine yesterday and it was WONDERFUL.

This week it was like an old friend got resurrected with the news of the Veronica Mars movie and a very dear and constant friend announced terminal illness with the news Google Reader would be closing. I've been doing a bunch of stuff I should have done ages ago--culling my RSS feeds, cleaning up my tumblr, tentatively starting the big beast of cleaning up my Twitter feed, and working on migrating my feedburner feeds...ugh. It's not fun, but it's necessary I guess. This whole thing has definitely made me reconsider how reliant I'll allow myself to become on free services in the future. Of course, paying services can go away, too! But Renay shared this article that's pretty much spot on about how Google destroyed the RSS reader ecosystem, though, which is what will make me think twice about stuff in the future.

However, Technorati released a study that said blogs are still more influential than social networks when it comes to consumer behavior which makes sense but I know is not what companies want to hear. Especially because it talks about small influential networks, rather than just getting one big social media person to say something about your product. And while this blog isn't really about selling things, it's nice to know there's still an important place for blogs out there. I have to admit I felt like the blogosphere was dying this week. When I was cleaning out my google reader, I couldn't help but notice how many feeds had gone dead. I miss the way blogging used to be. Also, it's kind of funny I read about this Technorati study because I barely use it anymore when once upon a time it was such a huge tool. Then they changed their algorithm to be more like, surprise, Twitter, and it just sort of faded away. But it's still there! Just like RSS will be.

But! Enough about that, I also wrote a little this week about visual media and the degradation of women. Since Elizabeth Jennings is one of the characters I talked about, I'm tying that into this MOST WONDERFUL piece about likability and female characters and how on paper Elizabeth is not the kind of character we'd like but she works so well on screen. I like what she says about likability and female characters--likability is something that comes up more frequently for female characters it seems. I think she's spot on with the importance of competence and action to the audience's overall general feelings about characters. I tend to like slightly prickly characters I guess, characters that seem to draw from a deep well and I think that's why Elizabeth, Juliette Barnes, and Michonne have been the characters I've loved most this season. None of them fit into behavior that is generally acceptable and traditional for women, but they are all wonderful. Not wonderful in the sense of being good/kind/selfless, etc, but wonderful because they are interesting, rich, and complex.

Anyway, hope you all have plans for a wonderful week! I hope to write some reviews! And read some good books. Talk to you soon!