This post marks the end of a personal era. Over the last three and a bit years I have religiously written something into Blogger almost each and every day. From late 1999, when I’d been in London less than a year, to getting my job at Time Out, to my disasterous relationships, through my period of limited work, right around to my stuff with EMAP, the BBC and UpMyStreet – Blogger has been with me. It’s been to conferences with me, it’s been to Los Angeles with me (twice) and New York with me (once). It’s seen me make any number of dumb personal websites, been with me when I watched the Twin Towers collapse. It’s sat beside me as I witnessed global news events and dumb websites involving kittens. Blogger has helped me make any number of great new friends (so many in fact that I’m bound to leave some out accidentally).
Today I say goodbye to Blogger and Blogger Pro. I’ve finally come to a decision. I’ve finally made the leap to Movable Type. It’s a strange sensation – knowing that I won’t be seeing that comforting black, blue and red site each and every day. My reasons are probably clear to most people so I won’t go into them – I couldn’t be critical of the service if I tried. It’s done so much for me – and for remarkably little in return. So instead, to say goodbye, I’m going to use one of the new features available to me and ask you all to raise your glasses and answer the question: How has Blogger changed your life?
Category: Personal Publishing
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Bon mots about Trackback…
A select few AIM bon mots about trackback from the last 24 hours or so that demonstrate that I have absolutely bugger-all idea what I’m doing on the internet and should probably go back to sheep-herding or something like that – something that’s not as intellectually taxing and that I can’t be so resolutely, systematically bad at:
“Question: Is trackback a pile of fucking arse that makes no sense whatsoever and doesn’t do what it says on the tin except in the most circuitous and ludicrously bad way possible?”
“How Trackback works in a nutshell: So linky article links to linked article then the linky thing sends a little note to the linked thing saying I’m trying to link to you and the linked thing goes So the fuck what? and the linky thing asks Didn’t I do this right? and the linked thing goes No, you don’t use the actual URL you use a magic different one that you don’t know and can’t easily find automatically unless you understand weird magic code and the linky thing goes You’re shitting me and the linky thing says No.”
“Trackback isn’t new-fangled, it’s just bad-fangled.”
“Someone said to me that the what of trackback was genius even if the how was terrible. I want to suggest that the same holds true of a brick that you claim can travel faster than light.”
I can’t quite believe that we’re doing the rounds of You’ve Got Blog again. But ever since diveintomark.org linked to it, I’ve been getting a new batch of referrals coming through to plasticbag.org – presumably from people who haven’t read it before. The reason I’m going to put my boot in again is because I still think it sits like a kind of poisonous lump of spite in the middle of webloggery and it really needs to be addressed. It takes many things that are obvious and have always been obvious and casts them in the most negative light possible, and at the same time it makes some assertions that are just plain ludicrous and can be proven to be wrong.
Joe calls this statement evidence of the incestuous nature of weblogging: ìThe other people who have blogs… read your blog, and if they like it they blog your blog on their own blog.î He digs at this statement as if it were evidence for insularity, disconnection, power-mongery – playground politics, essentially. But what he’s pointing out is a wonder of weblogging, not a failing of them. The reason weblogging has spread so far and so fast is because people who read them end up starting them. Weblogs are a viral medium of expression, spread by contact with webloggers. In fact, the worst case scenario for weblogging would be it it had become just another medium for some privileged well-paid people to talk to the general public. Everyone who likes weblogs should have one of their own. That’s the whole point.
“Counterblogging fails the test of novelty two ways: The links arenít fresh (theyíve been traded back and forth like saliva in a kiss) and no new events from bloggersí real lives are depicted.” Again the assumption is that each weblog is a micro-publishing empire in and of itself – designed to communicate only to non-webloggers. But one of the strengths of weblogging is that each weblog can act as part of a massive, distributed multi-threaded conversation that goes on all around the web. And as to links not being fresh – well people choose what they link to – no one is coerced – and the more the link is posted, the more the community indicates that the link is important. This importance is almost a kind of aggregated voting – which is helping Google help to get ‘important’ or pertinent articles seen more widely and read by more people. It’s not ideal yet, but it’s really getting there. That’s the whole point.
Joe says about the A-list: “Finally, independent confirmation of an obvious fact that is self-servingly denied by the Weblog aristocracy itself: Despite no appreciable difference in the ìthoughtfulnessî of their respective Web criticism, some Webloggers are superstars.” Since when was it news that some weblogs get more traffic than others? Some sites get read more than others because people enjoy reading them, because they’re consistent, because the people who write them have a special insight into what’s going on in the world around them, because they’ve been around longest. Whatever. There is no accounting for this interest, except by saying that people are interested. This is obvious. What’s also true is that if you do something good or great or write well or are particularly interesting then anyone can get people interested. And because of the increasing size of the weblog community (or communities) there are ever more people to become interested as well.
Joe says about the ‘publicity stunt’ of the little-girl-on-a-bicycle, “That clearly was not the intent, but the effect was the same, highlighting the incestuousness and insularity of the crËme-de-la-blogging-crËme.” He says, “The girl-on-a-bike prank was the rankest example yet of the mutual admiration society of the Weblog intelligentsia, deploying multiple identical coded messages … just because they could.” Without wishing to go into detail about the event – my part in which is still slightly embarrassing to me – that’s simply untrue. But the fact that people might use their sites to communicate stuff to their friends, families or loved ones – perhaps subtextually – doesn’t mean that there’s a cruelty or incestuousness behind the scenes. It might be possible to argue that at certain times certain webloggers have had significant influence, but most webloggers seem to become pretty immune to influence after a while. Independent people choose to post and do whatsoever they wish. And quite right too.
Joe points out that most people write in order to be heard. Yes. I think to an extent that’s true. Most of us, in our daily lives, don’t really get listened to very much – not our opinions, not our beliefs. Weblogs give us a space to speak and be listened to. Some people will only be heard initially by a very few others. Some who have been around a while or have written something particularly interesting, insightful or entertaining will be heard by thousands. But writing to be heard isn’t the same thing as writing for an audience. Writing for an audience suggests you’re betraying yourself for popularity. Writing for the web should be – and I think mostly is – about allowing people to present themselves as honestly as they feel comfortable with. And seeing what kind of reaction they get…
Next point – Joe slightly later says that “If youíre not an A-list blogger, you will stay off that list forever.” This is simply untrue. Firstly it posits this weird clique of webloggers who everyone adores. Which is untrue. Which has never existed. But more importantly, if you look at lists of popular weblogs – the ones that are most linked is probably the best measure – you continually find that (among some of the old faithfuls) new ones have emerged continue to emerge and reach prominence. Even diveintomark.org (which is fast becoming one of the web’s favourite reads) started a full year and a half after plasticbag.org, nearly three years after Jason’s and a full seven months after Joe’s article. Weblogs come and weblogs go – some start well-read, some become well-read and may others cease being read at all.
Joe’s final point is that everyone who ran a weblog – and was A-list – has loads of cash and is heavily involved in the internet scene. Lucky bastards is heavily implied. But it’s simply untrue. When I started my site I was unemployed or temping as a secretarial assistant in London. When my site started getting popular I was working inputting film production credits into quark documents on a freelance basis that could have ended at any time. I was responsible for all films that started with the letters P-Z. I did 4,000 films in all over six months. I earned little money, and when I finally got a permanent and stable job being an Editorial Assistant on timeout.com, I took a pay-cut. And I was far from the exception…
So there you are – an article that has a certain hideous potency in weblogging circles has little of substance within it. It’s one huge over-dramatisation of one man’s issues and irritations which has very little relationship to reality. The fact that it’s caused irritation and controversy is no reason to believe that it ‘hit close to the mark’ – in fact it’s irritating because it’s so profoundly not close to the mark. As an attempt to describe the varied people who undertake weblogging and the ways they interact with one another, it’s bitter, it lacks faith in human nature and it mischaracterises many well-intentioned people. Hopefully, this limited rebuttal will help limit some of its damage…
The word/phrase ‘lazyweb’ (which I believe was coined by Matt Jones) refers to the way in which if you describe something you’d like to exist online then someone else somewhere else will build it for you. But what do you call it if you never mention it and yet someone builds it anyway? The meme-stream is getting thicker, I think. Congealing. Clotting.
Well anyway – that’s my theory for Phil’s stunning creation of the Pepys Diary Project – which is a far more elegant, thorough and well-built creation than I could ever have conceived of – let alone built. It’s essentially a republishing of the diaries of Samuel Pepys – an incredibly prodigious and thorough London-based diarist from the 1660s. He wrote over ten years worth of diaries – which including descriptions of the black plague and the Great Fire of London. Essentially each entry is to be published in ‘real-time’ weblog-format from this coming January 1st. And it comes complete with the ability to add ‘annotations’ which hopefully will be a place where people can collaboratively research and explain what’s going on in each entry… All in all it’s a stunning piece of work…
When I was thinking around this area I did a lot of research into the possibility of finding decent journal-based or diary-based out-of-copyright material – but there’s a surprising shortage of it. It seems that the form of the journal or diary is very much historically contingent. It’s a recent form of self-expression. Here’s a piece from Walter J Ong’s “Orality and Literacy” which I posted a few months ago on the matter:
“Even in a personal diary addressed to myself I must fictionalize the addressee. Indeed, the diary demands, in a way, the maximum fictionalizing of the utterer and the addressee. Writing is always a kind of imitation talking, and in a diary I therefore am pretending that I am talking to myself. But I never really talk this way to myself. Nor could I without writing or indeed without print. The personal diary is a very late literary form, in effect unknown until the seventeenth century (Boerner 1969). The kind of verbalized solipsistic reveries it implies are a product of consciousness as shaped by print culture. And for which self am I writing? Myself today? As I think I will be ten years from now? As I hope I will be? For myself as I imagine myself or hope others may imagine me? Questions such as this can and do fill diary writers with anxieties and often enough lead to discontinuation of diaries. The diarist can no longer live with his or her fiction. ” (Orality and Literacy, Walter J Ong, Routledge1982)
Still – you’d think that there would be a great many diaries that were in the public domain – ie. published between the seventeenth and roughly the late-nineteenth / early-twentieth century. But if there are, it seems impossible to find them. The most evident one available is Dracula, which is available on Project Gutenberg [Dracula by Bram Stoker] and essentially operates as a set of several arch and wordy journals. The length of each of the entries makes it far from ideal. In fact most of the material that would be ideal for weblog republishing comes much later. I’d be thrilled to be able to put the Diary of Anne Frank online, for example, and I think it could be a tremendously powerful and valuable thing to do. But that’s unlikely to be available for quite some time to come…
Are there less left-wing or centrist political weblogs than right-wing weblogs? And if so… Why? It’s a sentiment I’ve heard a lot in recent months, particularly in relation to the warblogging phenomenon. If it is true, I have some theories as to why it might be the case – but I have little or no evidence to back them up with. And without evidence I have to accept the possibility that a substantial block of personal presumption and prejudice may be behind them too.
One of my theories would be to do with the inherent lack of absolutism and black-and-white ideology in liberal (in the British sense), centrist and left-wing thinking – particularly after most hard-line socialist and communist projects have tended towards failure. I would suggest that a suspicion of one-on-one narratives of cause and effect and a general belief in some kind of cultural relativism makes it very difficult to produce rhetoric of a kind that is most suited to weblog writing (or for that matter political-rally-style speeches). I’d say also that many right-wing weblogs are more than comfortable with the so-called realpolitik approach to politics and the world which looks towards (above everything else) the preservation of friends and family and a certain way of life. Real-politikal approaches never pretend to be considering all the possibilities or possible ramifications of their approaches, generally because (the argument goes, and it’s relatively convincing) the more nuanced and sensitive a policy is, the more it is crippled from accomplishing its stated aim. The Christian right could be seen as an extreme example of this kind of move towards simplicity (rather than pragmatism). For some hardline individuals on a great number of issues there simply is no room for debate or a multiplicity of opinion at all. Could this be one reason why weblogs – with their short, punchy and easily-digestable blocks of rhetoric have been ideally suited to right-wing arguments?
Another argument is purely historical. After the attacks on the World Trade Center, I think it’s fair to say that fear and aggression towards foreigners and some ethnic minorities probably increased in America. I say this only because of the reactions of some of the people who were there at the time and some of the subsequent reports – the Canadian whos parents were Iraqi who was deported from the States to Iraq, the Indian friend of mine who experienced harrassment, the weblogger whose ethnicity was continually in question. If (understandably) the disaster moved popular sentiment to the right (which it seemed to) and if at the same time the disaster was one of the things that pulled people towards weblogging, then it’s hardly surprising that weblog-space suddenly lurched heavily towards the right.
Why this hasn’t self-corrected over time is a more complicated matter, but I can say from personal experience that the sheer number and moral certainty of current right-wing webloggers is intimidating (occasionally terrifying). This in itself would not be a reason to avoid debate, except that (as is often the case with most organisations and affiliations of people) some of its more extreme members are not only vocal (as they should be), but are aggressive and quite prepared to demonise those that don’t disagree with them. I know several people who talked about politics only to find themselves targetted by these people and who now avoid the whole debate.
So is the reason for the lack of left-wing weblogs due to intimidation by the right, is it just a function of recent history or is it simply because those on the left find the medium too narrow for the politics they’d wish to discuss? Or are there other reasons? I’m interested in anyone’s opinions of this matter, so if you post something about it please don’t forget to let me know about it.
Last month – along with many other people – I agreed to participate in a questionaire about the relationship between weblog publishing and online journalism. I’ll be putting my responses online as I finish each major section of the questionaire. Today – it’s about my personal experience of weblogging…
1a) Can you give some details about how long youve been writing your weblog, how much you write, whether anyone else contributes to it?
I’ve been writing plasticbag.org for just over three years now. I write something almost every day, to the extent that I’ve probably only missed thirty or forty days in total over that period. No one else contributes to it – except in the form of friends suggesting links to me or me sourcing links and/or things I wish to talk about from other sites (at which point, where possible, credit is given). Guest-blogging – where someone takes over your site while you go on holiday – is something that I’ve never understood or allowed to happen on plasticbag.org (although I have on occasion guest-blogged for other people).
1b) What motivated you to start? Has your motivation changed?
The motivation to start was a desire for novelty – nothing more or less. Three years ago there wasn’t any kind of inter-weblogging ‘culture’ of any kind. At the time, I was much more interested in assembling little projects or micro-sites and seeing if people came to them. Occasionally I’d make a stab at something larger – like The Bomb – but I’d never really thought of (or even heard of) weblogs.
When I bought my first domain, I put some of the sites that I had developed on some subdirectories, but I didn’t have anything to put on the front of the site. I think I managed somehow to get exposed to evhead.com or kottke.org (I was a complete follower of Jason’s 0sil8.com work, which I still love) and through them found Blogger. At that point I think I literally went, “Well why the hell not stick this up… It’s quick and easy and it doesn’t particularly matter if no one looks at the damn thing…” Within a couple of months it was the busiest thing (in terms of page-views and in terms of the response I was getting over e-mail) I’d ever done.
My motivation for running the site has changed a lot over the years. Initially I think the freedom of being able to talk about your life completely freely and without any anxiety that anyone you know will ever find out was tremendously liberating. I think a lot of people who start off with weblogging as a form of personal publishing feel that way. But that’s almost inevitably doomed, since unless you’re very isolationist and incredibly careful about your identity, at some point your on and offline lives inevitably merge to some extent. You tell a couple of friends in real life, or people you meet online start to become more important to you. At some point you have to start acting with a bit of discretion.
I think for many people (and I count myself among them), even if you didn’t start your site as a way to have ‘a voice’ of some kind, that soon becomes the reason to maintain it. People feel pretty disenfranchised from the world around them – mostly their voices – their opinions – don’t really matter in the slightest. Weblogs – for good or ill – make people feel that they’re being listened to – that their opinions matter. If that was all they did, then I’d say that was enough – but sometimes these opinions are actually useful or well-informed or reflect a kind of expertise you don’t often see in the mainstream media – and then you’re actually doing something useful that helps the world or pushes a creative process further.
1c) How has your weblog changed, in style or content, over time?
I’ve answered many of these questions above, but clearly yes. Graphically it’s changed a lot – the design has gone further into the background, but more importantly the content has changed from undirected rantings to a less personal and more commentary/ideas-based type of writing. I feel I’ve moved from writing a diary or journal to writing a kind of fragmentary column. Other people manage this transition (if they make it) in different ways – some, like Meg from NotSoSoft have shifted from diary to a kind of lifestyle / creative writing column.
1d) Has blogging changed the ways or extent that you relate to public
events and issues?
Yes. Absolutely. Totally. In the sense that if an event seems particularly significant to me, or I think I have something to add to the debate surrounding it, then now I feel I can write something about it – something that might have some meaning for someone other than just myself. The sense of political impotence is reduced – there is finally something to do that’s between talking about it to friends and going on a march! I think it’s really that simple. That’s not to say that you can or will always react to every news story that comes along. A huge number of webloggers just didn’t know what to say or do when the World Trade Center came crashing down. For all the people talking about their experiences, there were others who couldn’t put finger to keyboard – didn’t feel qualified or entitled to comment… But at least these are now personal decisions. We can choose when to be silent…
Next: Ideas of weblogs as journalism
Ok. Right. This is where things start to get interesting. Firstly, a metaphor. Imagine if you will a solar system – let’s make it a binary system with planets that fly around it. Watch the suns move around one another. Watch the planets move around the suns. Watch the moons move around the planets. Watch their stable arcs cascading around one another. The reason they do this? We all know the answer – the various entities have an influence on one another that we call gravity… This influence, exerted by each and every participant in this system, is what keeps the system stable. If the gravity was dramatically lower, the celestial bodies would fly off from one another into deep space. If the gravity was dramatically higher, the celestial bodies would collapse in on themselves, forming one body – a symbolic monolith…
Let’s move in a different direction for a moment. Must we as liberal individuals believe in a world that gives each and every opinion equal weight. Are all views equally “valid”, “worthwhile”, “right”? And where does this leave us when we vehemently disagree with the tactics that people promoting these views start to use? And where do we end up when the views we must consider “valid” are precisely those views which don’t believe other views to be “valid”, “worthwhile”, “right” and are prepared to say so, and/or do something about it.
This last assertion is one of the simplest paradoxes of liberalism. But it’s not a model worth operating with. And here’s where the solar system comes in. Because a world in which we – as individuals or groups – are unable to extert any kind of pressure on anyone else for doing what we believe to be wrong resembles a solar system without gravity – an immediate explosion occurs, critical divergence, utter lack of stability. And a world in which we – as individuals or groups – are able to extert total pressure on anyone else for doing what we believe to be wrong resembles a solar system with absolute gravity – an immediate imposion occurs, monolithic thinking, totalitarianist repression, totally lack of motion, inertia, death.
The weblog space is a space that bends under the pressure of traffic and influence. But mostly it bends under the strength of reputation (earned by “good work” or unearned by association and / or tacit sanctioning by those who have done “good work”). And I now believe that as an individual operating responsibly in this sphere, I have to be aware of any and all potential abilities I have to legitimately (ie. without lying, cheating or unfairly manipulating the situation in any way) exert whatsoever influence I might have in order to stop what I perceive to be morally wrong, corrupt politics, cheap argument and potentially warmongering. (And yes – if you’re beginning to catch on – I am again talking about warbloggers). I think I’ve come up with something that I believe to be appropriate action in these circumstances, and it’s to do with the responsibilities of being linked to…
At the moment one very specific site is in my mind. This site, which I will not link to, links to a considerable number of intelligent and interesting people. Many of whom don’t share the politics or attitude of the man in question. Each one of these people is in a situation to act in such a way that would demonstrate their profound disagreement with those views simply by dint of their link being on his page. What I’m suggesting is that there is a power that comes with being linked to – and it’s a power that one should not only be aware of, but should feel the responsibility to employ – whether by sending a simple e-mail askind the link to be removed (“I do not wish to be associated with the bile-ridden drivel on your site”), or more proactively and campaigningly by using an .htaccess file or something similar to serve up a page which declares that you refuse to be associated with the views of the person whose site you’ve just left.
It’s not a lot, I know, but it’s the first thing that I can think of that actually represents some kind of weblogging ‘direct action’ – some kind of (almost negligible at the individual scale) gravitational influence that can be exerted by a site to act in such a way that it makes itself known as protesting without driving additional traffic to the thing they’re protesting about… And the best thing about it is that it’s entirely non-violent, non-flaming, non-confrontational. It’s a kind of passive politics – refusal to participate – refusal to allow yourself to be referenced – a bizarre kind of work-to-rule… The power of the inbound link should not be ignored…
PS. To clarify, maybe I can give a couple of examples… Let’s say a site links to yours that is homophobic – not a specific link to a specific page, but rather a general blog-rolling style link. To mention that site – to link to it – will promote their agenda, give them more page impressions, more people reading the crap they write. So what you could do instead is use an .htaccess file to shunt them through to a site that debunks myths about being gay.
Follow-ups:
This is a difficult post to write. It’s difficult because I’ve avoided writing it for far too long. It’s difficult because it forces me to face some things that I’ve tried to pretend weren’t happening. And it’s difficult because it undermines my faith in humanity and forces me to give up some of the illusions that I’ve desperately operated under for several years now.
About one year, one month and two weeks ago, the World Trade Center in New York was destroyed. All around the world, people looked on with horror at what was occurring. And before all the recriminations started, before the rhetoric became overwhelming, before the civil liberties were eroding, and before dissent became unpatriotic, there was this bizarre moment of pause, of stunned silence. And in that moment, there was a remarkable unity of feeling and purpose around the world. It was only when we all opened our mouths again that everything went to hell.
It was in this moment of shock that webloggers first started broadcasting their tiny, newly-vulnerable voices into blogspace. Some talked of their experiences of being in New York or of the feeling of vulnerability that all Americans suddenly felt – a vulnerability they’d never felt before. Some responded with exclamations of disbelief or anguish. But I think a large number couldn’t say anything at all – how could one say anything valuable in these moments.
Most of the people I know in the UK who ran weblogs didn’t know what to say or do. There was nothing that could be expressed that would be useful – nothing that could be done but sympathise from a distance. Many of us felt utterly powerless and yet desperate to do something. We came up with a project at the time that I think did some good. But then it’s really impossible to tell.
In most of this stuff, most of us tried to be impartial, non-confrontational and politically of a space that wouldn’t offend people who had just lost friends and family. That was the most important thing in the immediate aftermath – the orphaned, the widowed, the bereaved. As it should have been. Not political point-scoring or the use of those deaths as justification for military action. No flag-waving or advocating of interest groups that needed a say.
It would be months later before I would become aware of the phenomenon of the warblogger – months where information had filtered out gradually, where stances had calcified and battle-lines were beginning to be drawn. I started to notice politically radical statements appearing with semi-regularity on some people’s sites – and entirely new sites appearing out of nowhere advocating extreme universalising positions of every kind – evil muslims, the hypocrisy of Europe, the righteous thunder of America…
To my shame, only once did I make any kind of stand. I sent an e-mail to Stephen Den Beste about (what I considered to be) his overblown anti-European rhetoric – and he responded. I got a fair amount of short-term fallout in the form of highly unpleasant e-mails and comments posted on people’s sites. And I think at the time I decided that several things should stop me continuing with any kind of debate on these issues in public. Some of these I think are still valid, some of which I now think I could characterise as cowardice or laziness, nothing more…
The fact is I believed warblogging in its most hawkish, blood-hungry mode to be the short-lived rantings of extremists – and not representative of American online communities or weblogging communities in general. And because of this, I’ve got on with talking about the things that I personally find manageable or stimulating, and have kept far away from discussion of wars in Iraq, or bombings in Afghanistan, or racist violence in Europe and America, or the way all these events have been cynically used for party political ends, or the way in which state-sanctioned warfare is being transformed into a continuous enterprise just as civil liberties in all areas are being slowly limited. I haven’t said a word about the level of irony I felt when it became clear that Hollywood’s grasp on file-sharing technology meant more to most people than the fact that people were being held illegally across the world.
I’ve kept my mouth shut through all of this stuff. And I’ll probably continue to keep it shut, to be honest. But I needed an outburst today because of the stuff that I’ve been forced to come into contact with recently – the verbal attacks against Anil Dash for example – appal me beyond measure. I feel actual physical sickness at sites declaring whole religions to be at fault for the actions of tiny groups of often pooly-educated poor extremists. And this is the tiniest tip of the ice-berg.
I don’t know how to say it in any other way except to say that as an episode in web history, I personally believe that Warblogging has been shameful, horrific and a stain on us all. The escalation of warblogs is a disaster for development of personal publishing, and a crippling blow to the individual integrity and worth of weblogs and weblogging. This whole media – a media which was supposed to be about freedom of expression, allowing everyone to have a voice and a space to talk openly and honestly – has turned increasingly into the worst kind of soapbox punditry, witch-hunting and as a platform for violent warmongers and nationalists. And I’m afraid I feel partly responsible…
Clay Shirky on Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing: “This destruction of value is what makes weblogs so important. We want a world where global publishing is effortless. We want a world where you don’t have to ask for help or permission to write out loud. However, when we get that world we face the paradox of oxygen and gold. Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because air is abundant, oxygen is free. Weblogs make writing as abundant as air, with the same effect on price. Prior to the web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of us, most of the words we read cost us nothing.”
Key-point summary (all of which I agree with) for those without the intellectual stamina to read a short article on the web:
- For the vast majority of us, writing a weblog will not make us money.
- Other distributive media products cost money to produce.
- Because they cost money, they have to be sold for money.
- Hence books compete on the bases of quality and cost, demand and supply.
- With no cost to produce and with instantaneous, skill-less publishing, there is no scarcity – in fact there would be almost infinite competition – and hence no easy way to make money out of them.
- Individual donations (tips) based on perceived value (or affiliate deals) may make a limited amount of money… but…
- It’s not going to pay your bills, and while we’re at it, why the hell would you want to anyway?
There’s only one line I don’t agree with – “the people who have profited most from weblogs are the people who’ve written books about weblogging”. In fact I suspect these people have made almost no money at all, unless they’ve been added to University book-lists. More likely, the people who’ve made money are freelance web-savvy journalists publishing for mainstream press…
According to Google Blog there’s potentially a new front-page emerging for Google News. The current page can be viewed at news.google.com, and its apparent replacement is here.
To be honest, this news doesn’t fill me with the love and happiness that you might expect. About six months ago I thought of something that has probably been thought of many times in the past. It was a kind of news site that used things like Daypop and Blogdex to determine what was timely and interesting to people on a per-link basis, which could then be pulled together using something like Google News to a by-story list and which could then be attached to commentary from the weblog community directly on the page. It would be like having a world of columnists and op-ed writers ready not only to collectively decide between them what was newsworthy, but also to directly comment on the stories on the same page as the story was displayed. It would be an immediate vox-pop. A gauge of a huge community of divergent interests… That’s when I started to get excited, because essentially you’d be talking about a site that allowed anyone in the world to write a comment piece on breaking news stories.. And this extended right past webloggers themselves to mainstream writers. And if you could figure out a way of organising micro-payments you might be able to read the thoughts of academics, actors, writers, thinkers from all over the world – along with your friends, the people who share interests with you, the democratically expert… This would be the place where a world of webloggery demonstrated that being mainstream didn’t mean individuals writing like ‘proper professionals’, where a journalist could equally be conceived as the person who was nearest to the event when it happened. Where the sheer value of hundreds of thousands of webloggers could be condensed and purified and injected straight into the world’s new media bloodstream.
Most importantly, although I knew that other people were thinking along similar lines, no one actually seemed to be doing anything about it. I talked to friends about the idea and how useful and cool it could be. Some were intrigued, some bored – as you’d expect. I wrote the whole thing down and pitched it in the general direction of people who might be in a position to allow me to develop a system as part of my working life. And now Google News is so close to the first stages of something I really wanted to be part of, and I feel like I did when I was in the middle of my doctorate, watching the dot-com boom happen all around me, knowing that wonderful things were happening elsewhere that would fascinate me, but that I had to accept I wasn’t able to be a part of… It’s terrible to have invested so much of yourself in an idea only to see it go ahead without you. Even if you’re hardly the first person in the world to see the potential…