Wednesday, February 12, 2003

Blogger effect. We can make sports out of anything. War too. We like to sort the world into winners and losers, victors and victims, castes from brahmin to untouchable, hierarchies from worthy to damned. We've been doing it with blogs for years already. Awhile back a correspondent pestered me for months, trying to get me to deliver this message or that, or to moderate what he thought were my wrong opinions, because I was supposedly graced with powers of reach and persuasion that he was not. I finally persuaded him to follow Scoop Nisker's command: If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own. Before he got tired of it, his blog was pretty well known among those who shared his passions. (He's welcome back on my blogroll, any time.) There are a lot of people I'd love to see blog. Bruner Blog has a list of "Friends Who Don't Blog But Should." It's a worthy bunch. I'd add Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen, Kalle Lasn, Watts Wacker, George Lakoff, James Gleick, Steven Levy, Alvin Toffler, George Gilder, David Isenberg, Dave Farber, Geoffrey Moore, Esther Dyson, Mary Modahl, Hal Crowther, Rick Levine, John Naisbitt, Randall Stross, George Lakoff, Mike Wallace and Peter Drucker, to name a few. Like Dave, I wish Clay Shirky would start a blog too. I know it's not Clay's style, just like it's not, say, Jerry Michalski's (although Jerry has a blog and Clay doesn't). Some things are best learned by doing, and it strikes me that in the absence of doing Clay hasn't learned how poorly the power story applies in the blogosphere. In Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, Clay runs blogging through the power law mill, and the result is akin to running a cat through a Cuisinart: you get easily measured stuff that bears no resemblence to the subject of the study. One of his points: Given the ubiquity of power law distributions, asking whether there is inequality in the weblog world (or indeed almost any social system) is the wrong question, since the answer will always be yes. The question to ask is "Is the inequality fair?" Four things suggest that the current inequality is mostly fair. The inequality Clay talks about — the fact that some of us are graced with more links and readers than others — is of a purely numerical sort. It says nothing about why people write blogs, and why readers read blogs. To illustrate my own point here, go sort your email by name. Is there a power curve there? If there is, does it matter? For many of us (me included), blogs serve a kind of public email function. Since a bunch of correspondents wrote to me asking for my opinion about Clay's essay, I'm writing back to the bunch of them, plus everybody else who cares (a sum which, as a percentage of the true everybody, verges on zero). Speaking as a blogger, I don't feel any different when I write for two thousand (my daily average, which includes multiple visits by single readers, aggregators and automata of various sorts) than when I wrote for two dozen, or just two (starting with Dave and me). I also don't think of my readers as an "audience." That is a power trip. And when I even begin to act like I'm unusually important in some way, readers are quick to urge me off my high horse. That kind of feedback, which you only get when you're blogging, tends to relieve you of the urge to understand blogging in terms of one-to-many performance. That's why I doubt Clay would write this if he'd been blogging the last few months or years: Though there are more new bloggers and more new readers every day, most of the new readers are adding to the traffic of the top few blogs, while most new blogs are getting below average traffic, a gap that will grow as the weblog world does. It's not impossible to launch a good new blog and become widely read, but it's harder than it was last year, and it will be harder still next year. At some point (probably one we've already passed), weblog technology will be seen as a platform for so many forms of publishing, filtering, aggregation, and syndication that blogging will stop referring to any particularly coherent activity. The term 'blog' will fall into the middle distance, as 'home page' and 'portal' have, words that used to mean some concrete thing, but which were stretched by use past the point of meaning. This will happen when head and tail of the power law distribution become so different that we can't think of J. Random Blogger and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit as doing the same thing. 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.) Launching good new blogs is no less easy than it ever was, and good new blogs grow no slower than they ever did. Blogging tools like Trackback and Technorati don't signal the drift of blogging toward some kind of portalesque middle-distance, but rather a constant increase in the number and variety of tools available to the practice — plus the constant change those tools bring to the practice itself. Blogging is radically different than it was six months ago. Technorati alone has changed my blogging life, largely by acquainting me with all the worthy blogs with which I've been previously unfamiliar. The whole blogosphere is characterized by a high exponent of the experimenter effect. To borrow from Forrest Gump, blogging is as blogging does, and that changes every time somebody blogs something interesting that somebody else blogs about. It's wild. Talking about it is one thing. But you gotta be there. Either way, as soon as you start making laws, bloggers are gonna find ways to break them. [The Doc Searls Weblog] comment [] 11:55:12 AM