Blogging about the blogging, and then blogging about that. It’s kind of what we do.

You mean…I'm off the *team*!?

Posted on Feb 10, 2003 in Metablogging | 13 comments

Although until recently I was often actively drawn into discussions about meta stuff, it seems as if that’s no longer the case, and I find myself wondering why. Context in this situation is the new piece by Clay Shirky that seems to have people a-buzz, and around which a sometimes heated conversation is now springing. The aether is a-buzz with talk, but I don’t seem to be invited, which is unusual, and which I can’t quite figure out. No one’s invited me to the prom, mom! I know it’s unspeakably lame to whine about stuff like this, and I don’t mean to, but it’s worrisome, kind of, and on my mind, and has context given the topic of discussion, I think.
I wonder if that f–king Bloggie shortlisting is to blame, actually, and has fostered some sort of ‘well, f–k him, he’s going in some weird famehog direction’ feeling, which is most assuredly not the case. That surprised me as much as it did anyone. I don’t think I’ve gotten any more profane and offensive, lately, that I can see, and I tend to talk in much the same way as I always have, about much the same sort of things. If anything, I get more visitors on a daily basis than I ever have before. But the (smart, good) folks with whom I have felt a sense of neighbourhood in the past seem to have withdrawn. Perhaps I’m just talking more crap than usual, I dunno.
That’s life, I guess. But it leaves me befuddled, a little, and wondering if it really is the case, and if so, why it happened.
Anyway, I posted a few further thoughts over at Jonathon Delacour’s in light of what I’ve been reading about the Shirky piece this morning, which I reproduce here because I’m lazy, even if no one is interested (whine, sniff, pout).

Clay mentions LiveJournal, and I really see no one paying much attention to that particular phenomenon around the traps today. Last I heard, there were more people writing ‘blogs’ with LiveJournal than with any other tool, and last I noticed, the overwhelming majority of those were of the “publishing an account of your Saturday night and having your 3 closest friends read it” variety.
Ignore them (or to use more emotionally charged language, ghettoize them) and you get an incomplete picture of the whole.
It amuses me, and is predictable, that people would respond with ‘Who cares?’ Obviously, we do, or we wouldn’t spend so damn much time talking about it!
If I have a problem with what Clay was saying (well, I have a few, but) it would be his attachment, by implication or explicitly, of qualitative criteria to what he’s describing, and thus create a hierarchy, where none exists in reality. That, I’m guessing, is in part why some people seem to have their backs up over this.
13 comments

Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

Posted on Feb 9, 2003 in Metablogging | 6 comments

This somewhat academic and very interesting piece from Clay Shirky [via Phil] on (in part) the eternal A-list debate is heavy with meaty bits just begging for a good gnawing.
Some bones I plan to worry at a little more, when I’m in a gnawing mood :

  • Like Phil, I’m not so sure about “As beloved as [some well-known bloggers] are, they would disappear if they stopped writing, or even cut back significantly. Blogs are not a good place to rest on your laurels.” My recent experience of taking more than a month away from the site seemed to indicate otherwise, at least going by the crudest of measurements, hit counts.
  • “Finally, there is no real A-list, because there is no discontinuity.” I’m not sure this entirely makes sense to me, either, even understanding as I do the math underlying his point. I tend to think there is an A-list – a secret document, signed in blood, locked deep in the vaults under Stately Kottke Manor – mostly because folks deny existence of it! No, I’m not serious; I’ve always taken it as an in-joke of sorts that escaped into the wild and took on a life of its own, because it had a kernel of truth to it. Regardless, I would have thought that the Power Law distribution that Clay discusses, including the constellation of ‘stars’, would argue that there is an A-list of sorts, but not one that is entirely self-selected. Although in many cases those who sit at the extreme left of the graph (amongst the ‘stars’) may show no greater objective merit than some who do not, the other factors he mentions (early adoption, agreement-reinforcement, ‘solidarity’ and so on) combine to keep many who are there there, once they reach that level of recognition.
  • “Are there people who are as talented or deserving as the current stars, but who are not getting anything like the traffic? Doubtless. Will this problem get worse in the future? Yes.” The first answer is most assuredly correct, but I’m not so certain of the second. Although the network model that Clay uses is, I’m sure, unassailable, I’d like to think that the problem of talent going unrecognized will not get worse. Do I have any evidence to back myself up? Naw. Based on my traffic and recognition factor and all of that, I think I’m probably creeping up into the grey area between Conversation and Broadcast with this site (see below), but the truth is that I’ve been at it for almost two years, and although I’ve never actively sought out blog stardom, I do rock, and I’d've figured by now that I’d be, like, Master of Time, Space and Dimension or something.
    This, though, was the part that really interested me :

    At the head will be webloggers who join the mainstream media (a phrase which seems to mean “media we’ve gotten used to.”) The transformation here is simple – as a blogger’s audience grows large, more people read her work than she can possibly read, she can’t link to everyone who wants her attention, and she can’t answer all her incoming mail or follow up to the comments on her site. The result of these pressures is that she becomes a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it.
    Meanwhile, the long tail of weblogs with few readers will become conversational. In a world where most bloggers get below average traffic, audience size can’t be the only metric for success. LiveJournal had this figured out years ago, by assuming that people would be writing for their friends, rather than some impersonal audience. Publishing an essay and having 3 random people read it is a recipe for disappointment, but publishing an account of your Saturday night and having your 3 closest friends read it feels like a conversation, especially if they follow up with their own accounts. LiveJournal has an edge on most other blogging platforms because it can keep far better track of friend and group relationships, but the rise of general blog tools like Trackback may enable this conversational mode for most blogs.
    In between blogs-as-mainstream-media and blogs-as-dinner-conversation will be Blogging Classic, blogs published by one or a few people, for a moderately-sized audience, with whom the authors have a relatively engaged relationship. Because of the continuing growth of the weblog world, more blogs in the future will follow this pattern than today. However, these blogs will be in the minority for both traffic (dwarfed by the mainstream media blogs) and overall number of blogs (outnumbered by the conversational blogs.)

    To a certain degree, although I’m inclined to want to push back against the tendency to put things into two or three simple slots – in Clay’s piece they’d be Broadcast Blogging, Conversational Blogging, and Blogging Classic – I think he’s nailed it to the door pretty well, here, as long as one acknowledges the continuities between the styles, and that some sites in each bucket will break the mold.
    I think that one thing Clay misses in his description of the hockey stick head, the mythical A-list, the region of stardom, and the long, somewhat unsuccessful tail of conversationalists and classic link-and-a-haircut blogs, is the assumption that possessing ‘merit’ or ‘quality’ (Zen and the Art of, anyone?) automatically push a blog into the stardom stratum, through the processes he accurately describes. Many of those who have an online presence have no desire for ‘upward mobility’, I think, and are perfectly happy to continue what they do online with no sense that it is less worthy than anything else. Moreover, for every seeker after fame, there will be at least one who has no interest in assuming the pressures that hundreds (or thousands) of daily readers can bring. Of course, as I’ve rambled on about before, there are those who desire nothing less than fame and recognition, and cultivate it carefully, and measure it in links and hits.

  • “There is no A-list that is qualitatively different from their nearest neighbors, so any line separating more and less trafficked blogs is arbitrary.” Comparing two groups of blogs (ie those who get an average of say 500 hits a day and those who get an average of 50) this is true, certainly. Is it also true, as a generalization, when we compare two individual blogs? Which makes we wonder, too, what we mean when we talk about ‘qualitatively different.’ Dangerous and emotionally charged territory, this, perhaps, in the sense that for many people their personal web sites are an avatar of themselves, and the person they perceive themselves to be and the ways they want the world at large to perceive them are deeply wrapped up in what they say and how they say it.
    This is, one assumes, why (like on this very page) many people (especially those new to the game, before they get jaded and throw up their hands in disgust and disavow ever looking at their traffic figures) add hit counters to their page – they are looking as much for feedback on their own sense of self-worth as anything else. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. It comes part and parcel with the self-regarding Dark Side of the whole personal publishing world.

    • Anyway, I ramble, as usual. Although it may seem as if I’m arguing against some of Clay’s points, that’s not really the case. There’s a lot to chew on there, and I found it both illuminating and instructive, and thought I’d try and note down some of my reactions before the coffee wears off.
    Me, I like me some conversation, but as moderate fame is thrust upon me, I find it not unpleasant. What do you reckon?

    6 comments

    Coin of the Realm

    Posted on Feb 2, 2003 in Metablogging | 1 comment

    In light of recent ruminations in some places about the politics and social implications of hyperlinking and blogrolling, I find this amusing, no less so because of my opinions about some of the names involved. What a sad and silly game it is, and how inconsequential.
    For my part, were I asked, I’d have to say that Jim Cappozzola, whoever he is, can take a flying f–k at a rolling doughnut, even if I do agree with him about the virulence and unpleasantness of the Little Green Cesspool. The proper response, I would say, to his threats (is it a threat if the consequences are so completely and laughably trivial?) to de-link people if they do not comply with his demands that they de-link Little Green Poosticks is : “So?”
    Fun to watch the fur and feathers fly, I suppose. But it’s something a little embarrassing for adult people to be so concerned about, even if it does touch on important issues that go well beyond blogdom, like censorship and freedom of expression, like tolerance and bigotry. My response to LGF and its ilk, though, is a little like the one I have to those fat, 40 year old men who dress up in Sailor Moon costumes : “Yay! for expressing your inner dipsh-t and striking a blow for repressed losers everywhere, Mr Man, but please take it out of my face, OK?”

    1 comment

    Pundits-r-Us

    Posted on Feb 1, 2003 in Metablogging | 4 comments

    It’d be fun to get some statistics on Blogspot bloggers, or blogs in general, I suppose, to get a handle what the blogly zeitgeist is like. How many would characterize themselves as political, how many consider themselves part of a community, how many try to use the word ‘f–k’ on a daily basis, how many insist on writing posts without the use of capital letters…
    And how many call themselves ‘pundit.’ A whole hell of a lot, would be the answer for that one, it seems.

    4 comments

    A-list Ruminations

    Posted on Jan 29, 2003 in Metablogging | Comments Off

    Steve has some interesting thoughts, and beautifully-expressed, about some metabloggy issues that have been on my mind lately as well. Go, read.

    “I absolutely think that the blogosphere reproduces the mechanisms of reward and reprisal that we see in the offline world. Like rewards like, as I said. But not absolutely: I think there are more potential routes to ‘success’ as we define it in this unspace than there are in that other space; we may yet fall victim to offline patterns but we are also more able, I think, to reject them and work toward new patterns. I hope so, anyway.”
    [more...]
    0 comments

    Comments

    Posted on Jan 28, 2003 in Metablogging | Comments Off

    If this comment made today on an old post about the plight of migrant workers here in Korea is real, it makes me very sad.
    I’m sorry Qaiser, I have no job to offer you.

    0 comments
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