What a steaming pile of crap. Right it’s time we set a few matters straight around here. It’s time we got the weblogging house in order. The matter under discussion today is: Deconstructing “You’ve Got Blog”.
- The form of the weblog does not generate an appropriate type of content, only a format for that content. “Nominal” purpose be damned. People write about what they want to write about. If that happens to be their lives, and if their lives involve reading about other people’s sites then they will write about it. If it is dull, other people won’t read it. If it is not, people will read it.
- There are of course popular webloggers. There are also 60,000 weblogs or so to choose from if you don’t like them. The fact that individuals get excited when they are spotted by someone who they admire the work of, is nothing new. The fact that people who do good work now sometimes have weblogs is new. Jason gets respect from people because of 0sil8; Powazek gets respect because of Fray; Meg, Ev and Haughey get their share because they work at Blogger. All these people also write well for well put together sites. The other webloggers who have made a name for themselves do so because they write well or relatively well, design well or relatively well and have been around long enough to get known. It is, admittedly, getting harder for people to become well known, just because of the sheer number of the damn things. And who do these A-list people consist of anyway? Is it the beebo.org lot? Because that’s not working any more, and 9/10s of the people in the blogging world had never heard of it anyway.
- Publicity Stunts? Oh please. Intention counts for nothing? Brief piece of pointless history. I was the person who brought up the whole conversation about whether Jason and Meg were seeing each other initially. I got a lot of shit for it, which I regretted. The whole little girl thing was a piece of play, which I decided to expand upon, and which then a hundred other people decided to play with too. This was something fun and interesting in a bizarre way – worth exploring rather than slamming in my opinion. Regarding insularity: Everything that anyone has ever written was designed for a readership. A weblog’s readership might be the world, or it might be the community that has grown up around weblogs.
- Becoming a popular weblog really is as simple as anything else on the internet. If you do something different, If you have a different voice and you update regularly, people will read you. Losing your popularity is just as easy. There’s nothing more to it than that.