Monk

More cheery news about the death of the blog. What is more surprising is the report that Tumblr is actually becoming more popular, not just more popular than LiveJournal, but more popular than 'blogs', period.



Hell, I am delighted just to see that LiveJournal rates a mention, even though you can scarcely tell it from that bottom flatline.

Now blogging is the habit of those who love the sound of their own fingers banging away on a keyboard.

-- Joanne McNeil

McNeil is discussing the evolution of blogging and it's steep decline in the present e-epoch. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but one has to appreciate how well she nails the spirit of the thing. For me, I still like to see what I am thinking, and blogging still seems like a better way of doing that than just scribbling away in spiral notebooks. And there is some thrill in the possibility, however remote, of others reading this and taking it in. But, yeah, the typing can sound a little lonely.

As it turns out, millions more may be tiring of their shiny new toy. Yesterday the media ratings company Neilson reported that despite exponential growth in new users, Twitter has the problem of “making sure these flocks of new users are enticed to return to the nest.”

-- Eric Etheridge for The New York Times

I think there's something to be said for having a blogging resource that you feel comfortable about throwing out the most trivial details that move your day and your thoughts - kinda like talking to an imaginary friend, which can be beneficial if you don't have many actual friends, and it certainly looks better if you are typing on a keyboard rather than mumbling excitedly to yourself. The rule of keeping it brief helps, I think, because you can only take something so seriously when you are limited to twenty-five words or less.

In any case, the point here isn't the death of Twitter, but only that it has been perhaps overhyped in recent weeks. But as Nicholas Carr quips, “The half-life of a microblog is even briefer than the half-life of a blog.”

ME: Did you know you were designing a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls?

BIZ: We definitely didn’t design it for that. If they want to use it for that, it’s great.

-- Maureen Dowd for The New York Times

The media buzz surrounding Twitter won't die. I was put back in my seat to open my Maureen Dowd column and see a piece devoted to Twitter. Though, 'devoted' may not be the best word. She seemed wonderfully snotty toward the creators in her interview, which attitude perhaps strengthened my resolve not to open a Twitter account of my own. It might have been otherwise if they permitted, say, 300 characters instead of only 140.

( Dowd )

Bryan Appleyard gives us a celebration of blogging, and judging by his account, the blogosphere is still a growing phenomenon, as opposed to the cultural fad in decline that I've described it to be. His comments are a prelude to his list of the top one hundred blogs.

But before he goes into that list he makes one observation that I want to bring out, and that is the great gulf one crosses with the click of a button:

So the blogscape is not for the faint-hearted. Start blogging and you will initially be lulled into a false sense of security by the ease with which you just knock out a few paragraphs and click Publish Post. At once, there it is, out there for all to see. Remember, I do mean “all”. There’s a shocking disconnect between one fact — you sitting at your computer — and the next — what you just wrote being instantly visible to the entire world. Try to think of it as like stepping out of the toilet to find yourself standing on the centre spot at Wembley on cup-final day.

Yet the disconnect is the point. Blogging, says the supreme blogger and Sunday Times contributor Andrew Sullivan, “is the spontaneous expression of instant thought”. In addition, as Matt Drudge, one of the originators of the form, puts it: “A blog is a broadcast, not a publication.” The true value of blogs is the combination of that initial, unconsidered improvisation, done on the spur of the mood and the moment, and its ensuing broadcast to the largest audience ever created — about 1.5 billion internet users.

I remember before I even started blogging, I came across a tip that you should never put anything on the Internet that you wouldn't want to see put up on a highway billboard, and I imagine that even goes for 'friends only' and 'private' posts, because once it's on someone's server, with e-security being what it is, that material is potentially out of your hands and you are effectively thrown on the mercy of the gods, and the gods generally just like to laugh at us or strike us down.

Nevertheless, it is easy for me to forget about the public exposure. Of course, this is easy to do when, instead of an audience of 1.5 billion Internet users, I seem to have only one reader these days - Hi! - and write in virtual and real seclusion, enjoying a peaceful obscurity. Or maybe it's useful to forget.

But to leave it there would be disingenuous, no? For a lot of us, blogs are the easiest way to leave our mark in the world. As Appleyard relates, this is the double-edged sword that gives blogging a lot of its thrill. One of my childhood wishes was to be an author, and this is as close as I'm going to get. And maybe this is too close!

“A blog-with-comments is a piss-poor place to debate matters like the existence of God. It’s not even a good place to debate whether Obama’s stimulus bill is likely to be successful. Blogs just don't do complexity and nuance — which, I think, is why they’re so popular. As everyone knows, the less complex and nuanced the positions on a blog are, the more comments it gets. This is an Iron-Clad Law of the Internet. Blog posts are just too short to deal with the Big Issues, and too likely to be fired off in short order, with minimal reflection and no pre-post feedback from wiser and cooler heads. Andrew Sullivan may think this is a good thing, but I’m not inclined to agree. And of course comments are usually even worse than posts in these respects. Some wonderful conversations happen in blog comment threads, but they happen in spite of the architecture, not because of it. The architecture is fighting thoughtfulness with all its might.”

-- Alan Jacobs

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what they do is open the conversation to those of us who aren't public intellectuals or scholars. The big issues of the day aren't going to be resolved on common blogs, and we aren't even players in the real debates that shape policy and public consciousness. We represent how the debate is sifting down to the street level. A little democracy in action.

And, of course, professional bloggers like Andrew Sullivan do an even better job, bringing more academically skilled intellectualism to his blogging, and actually being a player in the ongoing national debates, helping to make the issues accessible to us, so we can throw around the ball a little among ourselves, and hence people become more informed on the issues, even if not on a truly intellectual level.

This is also in line with how I don't see blogs as a competitor against the mainstream media, but an adjunct to it, an arena in which to carry on the conversations that they start, and which they fuel with their professional reporting and their information.

I just don't see why there is so much defensiveness against blogs. Indeed, I have been under the impression that fewer people are writing or reading in the blogosphere anyway, that it is a cultural fad that has already crested and is falling, leaving in its wake the true enthusiasts.

In a bit of whimsy, I checked to see if GreatestJournal is still around. The site is still up, but now it's degenerated to the point where you cannot even post anymore. I'm still upset that the bastards lost all my pictures that I uploaded there. I had some special irreplaceable ones stored there.

Anyway, I noticed that another new LJ-type site is up and running: Inksome. If you look at the discussion at that news post, you'll see that it is just now attracting another wave of LJ refugees. The new userinfo page seems to be driving this little exodus.

It is too early to say what will become of Inksome, but, nevertheless, it is not a true competitor with LiveJournal. It seems to be another one-man operation. In fact, it looks like another InsaneJournal, and that site has been having all kinds of trouble, and I gather by the discussion that it's even offline now. The mothership remains the only real playground, unless you want to escape this Evil Empire altogether and go to Blogger or Blogspot, whatever.

As far as the userinfo page controversy goes, I've already grown used to it, now that I know it like my bruised dick. But I still think the new design is ugly. I cannot even see how that's a debate. It would help appreciably if they just gave the page a light-colored background, because all that white space kills. I'd still opt for the old userinfo page in a heartbeat.

The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn’t realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear.

...

I slumped to the kitchen floor and lay there in the fetal position. I didn’t want to exist. I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I’d have to destroy the entire Internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I’d ever made.

“I’m taking it down,” Ruth called to me from the living room, where my laptop sat on a table, displaying our no-longer-so-secret blog.

I opened my eyes. “Don’t delete it,” I managed to say. “Just make it all password-protected.”

-- Emily Gould for The New York Times

A long article on blogging that I thought some people might enjoy.

Sometimes I regret not keeping it as anonymous as I did at the beginning, keeping everything hidden behind false names and remaining a total mystery. But I couldn't resist the temptations that I found opening up to me and to test the waters of friendship and even trying my hand at romance.

Big mistake. Kidding myself that way.

And now I don't care to share the less than noble and lovable details of my existence and being, since I am no longer a wholly unknown character forever untraceable behind the screen and beyond the reach of your cursor. No big loss, I guess. You don't really want to know. And I cannot say the experience hasn't been useful, nor that it was without its poignant joy.

I suppose I'm even prepared to make the mistake again. What is a guy suppose to do if a babe posts her tits for you and then wants to know more about you? You owe her the truth, don't you? if only to kill her curiosity. It's only fair. And you cannot help wondering if she still might accept you anyway. Never say never, right?

It does bear the ring of truth.

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

SAN FRANCISCO — They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

~
It's the adrenaline I'm hooked on. It's the life we chose. Gunslingers on the wild frontiers of cyberspace.