Success

I notice a general trend looking through blogs, TechMeme, and Digg. There aren’t many coders anymore.

Five years ago the discussions were far more technical and geeky. Even insiderish. When compared to the hype and news of today.

It makes me pine for ye old RSS vs. Atom geek flamefests.

Anyone else notice this trend?

Not hard to see this: all you have to do is look in the Technorati 100, and many of the techs who used to be on the list have disappeared. A List Apart is one of the few that’s still on the list and still focused primarily on tech. Even Scripting News is geared more toward ‘bidness’ (as only Chris Locke could use that term) matters than tech.

This is what you all wanted, though, isn’t it? After all, you made Mike Arrington by continuing to link to him, as he links to startup, publishing material that rarely has anything related to do with tech, true tech. Look at who appears almost continuously in tech.meme–the same people, again and again. Who are the people? Marketers. What’s appearing? Marketing.

But this is what you wanted, Robert. This is the cow you’ve been herding, the ducks you’ve lined up. Weblogging has arrived! It’s a success now!

I also miss the old ‘wars’, not because they were a war, but because we seemed to be focusing on what’s in the boxes, rather than the box, itself. More than that, we used to debate. Didn’t matter each of our ranks, or at least, this wasn’t as much of an issue. I remember there used to be a lot of people with an opinion and it was fun. You could see these opinions in Daypop for a top story, or would follow the links from site to site and they’d all be to different people. We even talked about software to try and track the path of discussion it was so difficult.

Now, I get Scoble’s opinion, Arrington’s, sometimes O’Reilly, Om, of course, Winer from time to time, Nick Carr, when a contrarian is needed to add a little spice, Rubel, maybe ValleyWag, Calacanis, Digg/BoingBoing/Slashdot (like one solid movable feast), seldom a woman, hardly ever anyone less than a Technorati 4000. Oh, and whatever Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft feed us. Don’t need technology to track a discussion, now. All we need to be is the little bugs flitting around the same pile of shit.

I miss other debates, such as those on women in technology or women in weblogging. No, the whole BlogHer thing wasn’t a debate: that was a series of disconnected postings that generally discussed around a central theme without getting directly to the point. None of it even showed up on the main BlogHer page–what kind of transparency is that?

(Excuse me, I didn’t attend BlogHer so I’m not allowed to comment on it. I’m assuming since I don’t write for the BlogHer site, I’m not allowed to comment on it, either. Nice to know that encouraging debate is a Scoble family tradition.)

I miss arguing a point with passion and sincerity. Even sometimes acrimoniously. Not we get petty sniping or air kisses. All snark, no bite. And when we start to hear other voices, someone will bring up ‘troll’, another will bring up ‘flaming’, a few sprinklings of how ‘nice’ someone is, and that’s it. End of contrarian viewpoint, end of passion, end of story.

All that’s left is the pile, and cheese sandwiches.

But then, who am I to complain? I’m feeding the same machine that’s rolling right over me.