Category: Weblogging

The focus on ‘fault’ in the last post was inspired, in part, by the first sentence I read in a weblog post recently. It said:

It’s all Burningbird’s fault.

When I first spotted it, my reaction was one of feeling flattered rather than angered. I hadn’t thought I had so much impact on the world around me, that whatever the issue is, it was all my fault.

Of course, further reading showed that the issue really was minor, and whatever ‘fault’ was mine was relatively insignificant, and I was somewhat disappointed. No change in status; in a world of shotguns, I’m still pretty much an air rifle.

After all the discussion we’ve had on blogrolls and the problems associated with “top” lists, and the headway we’re starting to make on understanding of the problems associated with links and popularity, to read about this at Dave Sifry’s is equal parts disappointment and amazement.

With the AO/Technorati Open Media 100 list, we are honoring those individuals who are driving the proliferation of Open Media and leveraging the power of community, not an individual or a corporation. The purpose of the list is to provide a framework of this emerging industry. It will include the key players who are proving the impact of Open Media and building the infrastructures to facilitate it.

What are the categories?

The Pioneers: industry luminaries who created the vision of open media and continue to shape it.

The Tool Smiths: web service entrepreneurs and companies building the open media tools (blogs, social software, wikis, RSS, analytic tools, etc.).

The Trendsetters: the influencers driving and evangelizing the adoption and applications of Open Media.

The Practitioners: the top bloggers in politics, business, technology, and media.

The Enablers: the venture capitalists and investors backing the Open Media Revolution.

Leaving aside the fact that originally, the Pioneers was labeled “The Founding Fathers” — ooops!–one can almost see the finger going down the Technorati Top 100 list and the voice echoing, “Well, we need a category for…” With some outside the list such as Wikipedia, flickr, and delicious.

Jeneane at Allied has a good post (with some nominations that made me chuckle–though I rather like Roland’s), and Dave Rogers asked some tough questions, in comments and in a related post.

And it’s not just the usual pain-in-the-butt suspects making foo-foo noises, as Mary Hoder also lists some concerns, though she did provide nominations.

By categorizing some people as the “Open Source Media 100″, spokespersons are officially created, people who can then be pointed to for outside media and commercial purposes. This effectively creates barriers against not only new participation, but participation from those outside of the select few who are brought up again. And again. And again.

The reason why ‘open source media’, if that’s the new term now, has grown as it has, is that there is no ownership of any one aspect of it. It’s a fertile field with plenty of room for old players and new. Create a list like that is the same as putting a box on it and saying, “Okay, now, these are the owners”.

Stowe Boyd writes, Definitely a sign of maturity in the marketplace I guess. A sign of maturity? Or a desperate wish to ‘legitimize’ this environment?

Technorati has good, sharp, motivated people–real innovators. With the data and resources available, the group could do much more than just ‘count’ links, and run contests. There is no innovation in “Top” lists. What a waste.

(Oh, and yes — last ‘Technorati’ and ‘link’ post for awhile. One can only go ‘tsk tsk tsk’ and shake one’s head so many times.)

I am working on a programming project for a friend, and also writing another longish “Missouri Tale”, but in honor of Mother’s Day I thought I’d share photos I took yesterday of a very rare plant: the wild azalea. The plant is also known locally as a “honeysuckle” and considering that Japanese honeysuckle is an invasive species that the conservationists are working, hard, to remove here in the Missouri, the local name does sometimes lead to confusion.

The Missouri honeysuckle is native to this area, but only exists in three tiny locations in the entire state; Pickle Creek area, where I hiked yesterday, is one of them. It’ s an amazingly delicate and lovely flower, and I was able to spot it primarily because I took a wrong fork at one point and ended up taking a longer way around. A way which just so happened to have several of the plants along the path.

The trip yesterday was tiring, but very calming, which was to the good. Something else that is calming, or I should say calming down is the ‘blogroll’ debate, which is also to the good. Lauren has a new post on the recent events, which captures the essence of some of the concerns on all sides in typically comprehensive and thoughtful Feministe manner. Hopefully, others will follow suit.

Since pink is supposed to help calm emotions, another photo of the wild azalea to speed this positive discourse on its way. (Notice how nicely it clashes with the strong colors of my site? I am always so glad when I can introduce these moments of exquisite pain, naturally.)

What I found interesting about the whole experience is that when I first published the post that triggered much of the recent anger or dismay, there was a great deal of defense of blogrolls but not much in the way of animosity in the responses. However, most of the people who responded then, over a month ago, were those who have read other of my posts, and were, more or less, familiar with my writing.

In this new discussion, the post was the first time that many of the people directed to my site had ever read me and they took what I was saying as a demand that people drop their blogrolls, that blogrolls are evil, and so on. Chris said that what I wrote was good except for the one statement about “…those with blogrolls, you are hurting us”. He said that was hyperbole and I agreed — of course it’s hyperbole. The very fact that I borrowed the phrase from Jon Stewart’s Crossfire appearance, and said so in the post. should have provided a strong hint of the nature of the statements that followed.

Stewart’s statement was also hyperbole. It was reducing all the sophisticated rhetoric attached to the media’s role with its public into simple, primitive, emotional terms and baldly thrown into the faces of the Crossfire journalists, leaving them absolutely no where to go, but inward. It not only pushed the journalists down the slippery slope — it iced it so they couldn’t climb out.

At the time I despised the phrase, but after watching many more of Stewart’s taped shows, I began to see how brilliant his approach was. Unfortunately, though, I may lack his deft touch with hyperbole, though I think I’m getting a handle on his use of satire.

My biggest mistake was I didn’t take into account when I wrote the statement that someone reading that post without having any history of my writing, thought processes, or even my reasons for using the Stewart phrase, is going to interpret what I was saying differently from a ‘regular’ reader. This was an eye opener. A rather contentious, somewhat fractious eye opener true; but an eye opener nonetheless.

Becoming aware of this as an issue, however, does not necessarily mean I will be viewing all this as an impetus to change. I will continue to use metaphor, hyperbole, and litotes (I am just so clever), indulge in satire and acrimony, revel in passion, gloat with anger, and even, or especially, insert my unique brand of “Tales of the Ozark” whenever it suits me when I write–but I may spare a few more minutes of time to consider the innocent who stumbles on to my page through a link or through some search engine. I may not write any differently but I will spare that time; as momentary penance for my act, if for no other reason.

Reflect. Reflect. Moving on…

But oo la that’s not the way to end a Mother’s Day post, which is supposed to have pink, diamond like stuff and be filled with fussy figurines and rosebud teacups — mothers immediately losing any and all interest in ’sleek’ and ‘edgy’ and ‘minimalistic’, as soon as they behold their offspring for the first time. So I’ll end with another photo of the wild azalea, even though it is neither fussy or a rosebud, but it is a lovely, delicate pink.

I also want to point out a site that I stumbled upon when I was reading some of the posts related to the blogroll thing: Illustration Friday. It is a site that lists a word each week, and people supply illustrations based on this word, using whatever medium they prefer. It is a fascinating mix of art ranging from the too cute to the frankly powerful and disturbing, and a rare good find. My thanks to MizzKitty–who wrote another very thoughtful post on the blogroll issue–for the find.

One last note on this overworn topic: from the comments I’m reading, perhaps what we should do is keep the blogrolls, but throw away the writing.

Joking! Well, kind of.

Melanie McBride wrote in my comments:

To be honest, the blogs I’ve read that don’t have blogrolls appear to be doing something not disimilar to traditional media and I find a blog without a blogroll says ME ME ME far more so than one that points to other voices.

And I have noticed that the more established a blogger gets the less they really have to rely on “community” and so what do they do but ditch the blogroll. Or so it would seem.

Blogs, for me, are still very much about communities.

Communities.

Whether a weblogger has a blogroll or not is nothing more than technology. It’s a bunch of links, and has nothing to do with ‘community’ or even individuality–especially individuality. They can be handy for finding people of ‘like mind’, but this just generates its own danger. Why? Though we may link to stories by people we don’t like, or even despirse, we generally don’t put them on our blogrolls. Rather than encourage diversity, we encourage homogeneity with our blogrolls.

Even then, they can give new folk a step up, and there is good in them and if you want your blogroll, by all means keep it. Please! Keep it! And to be fair, since I don’t have one and haven’t had one for a couple of years now, if you want to remove me from your blogroll, please remove it! I really don’t check to see if I’m on your list or not when I read your writing.

But stop investing an emotional context in what is nothing more than a bunch of hypertext links. This is the kernel that started so many of the problems with A-lists and long tails today — we invested both emotional and economic worth in links; we made them into something more than a way to get from A to B.

True communities don’t need to mark their territory, like we marked the states, blue or red; or be held together by baling wire made of virtual strands across the threaded void. Community happens when we reach out to each other, in times of joy, and in times of need; community is when you realize another has become an important part of your life, and it no longer matters whether you’ve met the person, or not.

Anything else, is just building bridges out of bricks made of air.