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The Exclusive Interweb
January 17th, 2006Hugh MacLeod is on a tear about blogging. Creating one punchy top ten list after another, and now the two immutable laws of blogging. A return to discussion of blogging for blogging’s stake, since he’s been away attending to suits and wine. About time.
Sorry, The Blogosphere Is Closed
There will be no more new blogs in 2006, according to Mark Newsome, this comes via Hugh.
Why It’s Impossible to Build a New Blog in 2006 – Kent Newsome
Once you add the element of money into the equation, the element of competition soon follows. So you get the haves linking to one another (and largely only to one another) and ignoring (or at best tolerating) the have nots, in an effort to boost their status and, perhaps more importantly, protect their shares of the readership pie. Anyone who argues this isn’t true hasn’t spent much time surfing around the blogosphere.
What if you don’t add the element of money? Perhaps you’re not intent on raking in Google Ad revenue. You may have a job or some such.
Perhaps you watch the A-List bloggers prattle and link among themsleves and find it somewhat seedy and incestuous.
Perhaps you’ve seen them go around the block more than once on the Cluetrain, Naked Conversations, Power Law, gobbledy-gook and you just don’t feel like reading it one more time.
What if you simply don’t read A-Listers or care much about what they have to say?
The Non-Business Model
Who in my blogroll has a business interest in their blog? Certianly none of the Ann Arbor or New Orleans bloggers. Could there be some other reason to blog?
Can a new blog succeed? – Ric Hayman
But when I think about why I blog, it has more to do with self-expression. While it might be exciting to discover that half the Western world was hanging on my next post, I suspect that a lot of the joy would disappear in a flurry of expectations. I think that there a lot of bloggers out there who are doing it for their own reasons, and that only a few of them relate to reaching a large audience, and/or making money.
My motive for blogging was driven by an open source ideal of communicating my hacks in the hope that someone, somewhere would find it and get a head start.
Post post K this has morphed to a process of introspection that leverages the long tail.
Ric closes with, “I think the ’success’ or otherwise of any blog depends entirely on the blogger’s own definition of success …”
For your blog, how do you define success?
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Comments 
Being part of a discussion with people all over the world is more involvement than I ever thought I would achieve – I’m pretty happy with where my blog is at right now!
As a seasoned hack I thought I’d seen it all until I started blogging. The astonishing thing is the number and variety of people who stop by. And I’m writing about what I find one of the toughest subjects in the world – passion among professional accountants. No wonder ‘we’ are reviled…
For your blog, how do you define success?
Being able to say that I am contemplating turning down a tempting offer of ’sponsorship’ because of the long reaching ramifications of accepting money for something that, as Ric says in your quoted snippet above,
… has more to do with self-expression
Can you commodify your brain? your thoughts? Should you? Where do you draw the line between what you do to earn the rent and what you do to express yourself? Back to the roots of your seeking, Alan.
A blog is a tool, just like money is a tool … to the ends of better living, the freedom of expression and, concurrently, the expression of free will. It’s when these things become ends that it gets dicey and questionable.
I’ve been talking to and meeting “online” people since I was a teenager. I even ran my own BBS out of my parents’ house when I was in high school. To me, blogging is just the latest extension of this form of social interaction. In person, I tend to be rather shy and reserved, so I’ve always appreciated the laid-back, low-pressure kind of interaction that being online offers. It’s always nice to be paid for one’s hobby, but I don’t envision ever really putting ads on my blog, even on the off chance my readership becomes substantial. For me, it’s just a nice way to express myself and, if I’m lucky, make new friends. It’s a way of “putting myself out there” that I can do sitting in my pajamas with a cat on my lap.
I like when people read what I write, and comment, so “success” for me would probably be something like a sizable readership from which I continually make new friends.
I’ve been talking to and meeting “online†people since I was a teenager.
Me, too. Blogging, i.e. beebing with a fancy GUI, is no different, except there are less geeks. And then you realize: non-geeks are humans, too.
I agree with Dave that this is a new social network that is very familiar. Dave and Maitri started with beebs. I never used those. I started with USENET in 1996. It taught me most of what I know about computers.
The difference, I think, is that blogging gives you more identity and accountability. The groupings are a lot more abstract, as well. We can conduct conversations without having to create a group, the group forms around the particular ideas that interest.
I’m feeling very successful with my new blogging rig. The Kiloblog records my blogging sub concious, while the Blogometer is where I link and discuss.
My blog roll has been reduced to a handful of bloggers, like everyone in these comments, who I actually converse with.
I might create a New Orleans political blog, ala AAIO, now that I see that creating separate blogs is actually quite effective.
I wish there was a single rig I could blog from. The opposite of an aggregator, an idea disseminator? Persona management?
Persona management? Might have to start calling you Sybil …
Jokes aside I think separate blogs for separate purposes is probably better than than foisting multiple personae on whatever audience there is.
Success defined
In a very narrow sense anyway! Alan has put the question out there, and it deserves an answer. For your blog, how do you define success? I will consider this blog successful when I can post regularly with my own
Yes, as far as “persona,” I think the online me is more or less the same as the offline me, though people who know me in both contexts would be better judges of that. My real-life concerns, interests, and obsessions are reflected online. I may talk about them less offline (maybe), but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. I have only one persona to manage. But it’s a nice idea that if I wanted to “reinvent” I could start another blog and go from there.
Dave
Living the Long Tail is about destroying personae. Putting yourself out there and allowing the right people find it.
I agree that maintaining a persona is an overhead. It is too difficult for an individual to use the Hollywood tricks to change how people perceive them. I am not a corporation, I cannot afford the overhead of PR and HR.
I gotta be me. I don’t have a budget for anything else.
Ric
I am overloading my buzzwords. Bad move.
I say I’m destorying my personae, but then I recycle persona for something that I think would be useful.
I’d like to have an editor, from which I create my postings, and then when they are finished, I decide which channel to send them down.
I’d imagine a blog where you could subscribe to my different persona.
These are not facades that I create to puff myself up into a role, but simply hats I wear. Different logos, visual elements and feeds, or maybe you can have a mash up, that takes the parts you find interesting.
The nice thing would be one user interface to rule them all.
These are not facades that I create to puff myself up into a role, but simply hats I wear
You assume that the different faces you wear are static, even on the scale of days or weeks. No, I don’t consider you or me that capricious in maintaining that which makes us us. Instead of dedicating different blogs to various aspects of your personality, why don’t you let each post do the talking and develop a morphing personality over time? Most people reading your blog are probably smart enough to assemble a personality just from your posts, instead of you categorizing for them in advance.
Ever since Katrina and VatulBlog became all New Orleans all the time, I maintain another blog to talk about all the other things I’m interested in. Then again, my personality and its contents come through in the NO posts, too. Guess I’m a lumper and not a splitter that way.
Maitri
I’m not communicating well right now, I don’t think. Maybe it has more to do with the salon in which I conduct the conversation, than with the persona that I affect.
I definately wear two separate hats. Throughout the latter half of 2005, I’d post soley on the stuff I was learning about my systems. On occasion, someone would come across a posting they found interesting and comment.
Now I appear to be having conversations, with a select few fellow bloggers. This is a very different form of blogging than what I had last year.
Thus, it would be nice to manage a software blog and a life blog, from the same control panel. Persona management? Blogging relationship management? A place to gather ideas, share them with the two different cliques, but maybe in a different way.
In any case, that’s the function of the Kiloblog. A place where ideas can be raw.
See? The software and the life personas meld here.
Perhaps we should be thinking of “purpose” rather than “persona” – Most people have different facets of a single persona (except for those with a multiple personailty disorder – an illness), but what Alan is suggesting in his own blogging is that he has different purposes for each of his blogs – and on each of them he has made it fairly clear what those purposes are. One for technical geekdom (which I also find interesting, but for different reasons), one for ’socialising’, one for … [fill in the blanks].
And being able to use a single tool as a blog editor, but direct differently-purposed posts to different blogs (in a similar way to using categories now), sounds like something useful. An opportunity perhaps?
Ric – Yeah. I think so. I’ve also felt that the boundires between the blogs, or channels, could be blurred as needed. Most importantly, it’s important to remember that the information comes from a single source. If that source is me, I’m so over taxed. I also have a limited capacity for generating new ideas, so I’ll probably present the same idea to the different circles, but in different ways. All my notes, though, need to be in one place.
but what Alan is suggesting in his own blogging is that he has different purposes for each of his blogs – and on each of them he has made it fairly clear what those purposes are. One for technical geekdom (which I also find interesting, but for different reasons), one for ’socialising’, one for … [fill in the blanks].
Then, just have two different blogs and get it over with. What’s the discussion about? Sorry for sounding so blunt, but there are several bloggers who have separate blogs for several distinct aspects of their personalities. If they are interconnected often (with links and relevant references within posts), all of these blogs become a part of a larger person, in this case Alan.
C’est tout.
Maitri
Ric and I are the shmucks who have to make the software happen. We have to talk about it in a bit more detail.
What is a blog anyway? It’s just a web page with new content added to the top, with a datestamp. Why not write it up by hand? That kinda thing. The devil is in the details. Software evolves in tiny steps. The changes, like blogging, or tagging, or syndicated XML feeds, are seemingly trivial.
I’m not trying to be contentious with you. Merely wondering if there isn’t a better mechanism for blogging. I feel that blogging is geared toward A-Listers with celebrity blogs. I’m more likely to either carry on a discussion like this, or write a post about something I learned for others to find via Google. I don’t know that I have subscribers.
I’d like a better blogging rig.
The philosophical and aesthetic concepts of blogs are are 90% of the details. The rest is coding. Not to sound contentious with you, either, but the struggle for a better blogging platform has little to do with personae. Quite a few with little programming interest or expertise have reached beyond this problem to share multiple facets of their personalities.
However, I respect your desire to create a better multi-sided blogging platform, and will leave it at that.
I think the issue of roles and personae are serious. At it stands, the blogosphere models journalism. This blog entry responds to a blog entry that says that there will be no new blogs in 2006, which is asinine if you’re not intent on generating add revenue. (It also negelects to recognize that stars fall as well as rise.)
We can’t all model ourselves on celebrity. The questions of what you present, how you present it, and how it relates to your real life are questions that have not yet been answered. Certianly, I’ve not answered them for myself.
As a development issue, the reverse chronological diary, with the daily updates to keep it relevant, this is fine, if you have the time and energy for perpetual blogging.
I’m saying there are other models, that have not been developed, and the constraint, one of them at least, is the software. The web log, the blog, needs to give way to other forms of syndication, personal publishing.
The subscription model works. I don’t have enough content for my different purposes to fill a channel, though. I’d like to create software that would allow bloggers to start conversations in a channel and continue until it dissipates, as an example.