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Saturday, November 15, 2003
Celebrating Conditional Celebrity 
| | In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people. |
| | A year ago, I barely knew what blogs were. Within a few months, they'd become a staple of my daily media diet. Now I can't live without them, but already I'm feeling betrayed -- and a little bored. |
| | What began as the ultimate outsider activity -- a way to break the newspaper and TV stranglehold on the gathering and dissemination of information -- is turning into the same insider's game played by the old establishment media the bloggerati love to critique. The more blogs you read and the more often you read them, the more obvious it is: They've fallen in love with themselves, each other and the beauty of what they're creating. The cult of media celebrity hasn't been broken by the Internet's democratic tendencies; it's just found new enabling technology. |
| | The problem's built into the medium itself. Blogs are set up to be personal forums for someone's opinions. That's the point, the liberating thing about them. Bloggers don't have to get their copy past an editor, and they can sound off at any length -- no word limits in cyberspace. They're products of a seismic cultural shift that makes someone's hangover as newsworthy as the arrival of a Harry Potter novel. The sassier the voice, the more successful the blog is likely to be. In a Google universe, success is defined by hits: the number of visits a Web page gets. The more blogs link to each other, the more hits they all get; enough hits and a cyberstar is born. (Okay, color me envious: I don't even know if Google can find my Web site, not that anyone's looking.) |
| | I have the same problem with Jennifer's preoccupation with celebrity as I did with Clay's preoccupation with power. Weblogs are about neither, at least not fundamentally. Again, blogs are journals — even the ones that have fun with the whole celebrity thing. |
| | Let's take that last paragraph apart (hey, I have time for a change... I'm sitting in the back of the room in a session that's just gone way too technical for me to follow): |
| | The problem's built into the medium itself. Blogs are set up to be personal forums for someone's opinions. That's the point, the liberating thing about them. |
| | The Web is a medium, but blogs aren't. They were also set up to be personal journals. In some cases, where comments are welcome and involved with the site, they're "forums." But that wasn't the point in the first place. But they are liberating, for sure. |
| | Bloggers don't have to get their copy past an editor, and they can sound off at any length -- no word limits in cyberspace. They're products of a seismic cultural shift that makes someone's hangover as newsworthy as the arrival of a Harry Potter novel. The sassier the voice, the more successful the blog is likely to be. |
| | First, any serious blogger has editors in other bloggers. Hardly a week goes by that I don't get several corrections from readers. Second, the seismic cultural shift isn't about newsworthiness in the mass media sense. It's about worthiness, period. And that varies by readership. What makes something linkworthy isn't that readers find a posting cool or even news. Often it's because (as in this very case) the reader thinks the writer is partly right and doing a good job of helping scaffold a new understanding about a subject. Third, sassy? I've got a relatively successful blog here; but is it a "sassy" one? Grumpy is more like it. (Silly digression: since my nickname in junior high was "Sleepy," and since I sneeze frequently, and I remain dopey about all kinds of things, and I am basically a happy guy, I shall now claim to have been all seven dwarves.) |
| | In a Google universe, success is defined by hits: the number of visits a Web page gets. The more blogs link to each other, the more hits they all get; enough hits and a cyberstar is born. |
| | Wrong. Google's PageRank values links, not hits. Example: Do a search for the word weblog. The most popular weblogs, Andrew Sullivan and Instapundit, which both boast upwards of 70,000 visits a day, aren't anywhere near the top. The blog you're reading now, which gets about the same number of visits in a month, is #5. The #1 result may get even fewer, for all I know. |
| | Google's insight is that links=authority. When we point to a source, we say "that matters." Stardom and matterdom are very different things. |
| | Yet Jennifer is also right about the clumpiness, or cliqueishness, of the circles that tend to develop: |
| | From the Old Hag, who gives us blogrolling in a nutshell with this Nov. 7 post: "We'd also like to take a moment to draw your attention to some new blogs of note. If you look at our links list, you'll see Chica (whom we TOTALLY discovered, and now she's all Gawkered and Terry'd and does Choire EVER LINK TO ME?). . . . " |
| | Note the offhand references and the verbing of names -- the Old Hag assumes that not only do you read blogs, you're on a first-name basis with the hip dudes and dudettes who run them. What, you've never heard of Chica, Terry and Choire? Let me introduce you, in order, to the up-and-coming blogger behind Cup of Chicha (www.nchicha.com/cupofchicha/); Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout, who moonlights as a blogger with his site About Last Night (www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/); and ur-New York media blog Gawker.com and its editor, Choire Sicha, who maintains his own blog at www.choiresicha.com. I only know this because I've been reading these sites long enough to get a feel for the usual suspects. Otherwise I'd have no clue either. And I'm not sure why I should want to. |
| | Maybe the back-scratching started as revolutionary solidarity. Now it's a popularity contest in which the value of information is confused with the cool quotient of the person spreading it. Late-night TV has Jay and Dave and Conan; the blogosphere has TMFTML and Old Hag and Choire, only unlike the gods of late night, the gods of the blogosphere really, really like each other -- and say so every chance they get. |
| | They're not so nice to the less popular kids, often establishment-media types who get flogged out of all proportion to their op-ed offenses. The last few months, it's been all the rage to paste Laura Miller, a critic with regular gigs for Salon.com and the New York Times. One of the kinder comments, this one from Cup of Chicha: "From the way she writes about contemporary short stories, it feels obvious she doesn't read them." Even if you're not a fan of Miller's, the attacks can get so nasty it starts to feel like bloggers pick on her not because they think she's a lousy critic but because she gets to sound off every other week in the New York Times. |
| | So, yeah. That stuff sucks, I suppose. But y'know what? I hardly read any of the blogs Jennifer talks about here. (At least not yet; I've just been introduced.) I'm not surprised at the in-crowdism, but I also don't care. |
| | See, the differences between the world of blogs and the larger world it occupies are getting smaller as blogs become more numerous — essentially becoming what we expected Web sites to be in the first place. Characterizing all blogs in terms of just a few is as silly and wrong as characterizing a country in terms of, say, their soccer hooligans. |
| | This isn't high school here. We don't have to suck up to the popular kids, or try to be like them. If we want our blogs valued, if we want Google juice, we only have to try to say something worthwhile — meaning worth a link. It's not a lot more complicated than that. Just a lot harder to understand than a popularity contest. |
| | Bonus Link: Evectors k-collector seems relevant to all the above. I'm still not sure what to make of this, other than discovering that I've been linking to David Weinberger even more than I thought I was. |
In the rebeginning was the word....
Okay, now I want one
| | This is just too cool. I'm listening to streaming Internet radio stations on my phone. It's a true emergent service, a brilliant illustration of the end-to-end principle at work: |
| | MP3 files --> Shoutcast --> SprintPCS network -- > Pocket Tunes on my Treo |
| | And it just works. I click on a link, it loads, it plays. |
Anal of Aging
| | Either he's on permanent vacation or he's got liver failure. |
Paul Mall
Breaking a Budget
World Blovernment
BetterCon
| | Here's Ken's GPS track of his recent travels. He also has a very complete explanation of how room connectivity here at the hotel is selectively (though not always deliberately) fucked. (I finally managed to send email last night with the help of Dave Sifry, who patiently taught me how to tunnel to my mail server.) Here at ApacheCon, the wi-fi comes unrestricted. |
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