dive into mark

Lighthouse © James Caulfield / CC

Three writers have seriously influenced my thinking about personal online publishing in the past few days.

It begins with Joe Clark’s scathing deconstruction of ‘You’ve Got Blog’.

The blogging/counterblogging form pretends to function as a conversation, but, unlike E-mail or instant messaging or any kind of threaded discussion forum, the effect is one of talking at people rather than with them. But you’re talking at them in public, rather like chatting on a cellphone at the mall, only in this case third parties stand a good chance of reading both sides of the conversation.

… Now, according to the egalitarian mythos of the Web, anyone can publish. You skip the step of requiring an editor and publisher, but no one is willing to skip the step of requiring an audience. Take it from someone who wrote since age seven and has been published in print nearly 400 times and an actual book: Few are the writers who do it for themselves. Even handwritten diaries will be discovered posthumously, as every diarist knows deep down.

… The fears of these neophyte bloggers are, in fact, entirely valid, but may require restatement. It’s not that you missed the Golden Age. It’s just that the age is golden only for other people. And there is pretty much no way to breach the velvet rope: If you’re not an A-list blogger, you will stay off that list forever.

… What the huddled masses yearning to blog their way into superstardom are left with, then, is not merely talking at people, but talking at a perennially minuscule group of people.

I think Joe is wrong about the A-list being forever roped off. When he wrote this piece, I hadn’t even heard of weblogging; now I’m #10 on Technorati. Clearly there is upward mobility.

However, I feel he is dead on about the nature of weblogging conversation. It is most definitely talking at people, not with them. That they occasionally happen to talk back at you (and poke you with a wide variety of digital poking mechanisms) does not make it a conversation in any traditional sense. This is not to say the form has no merit — it does — but I think the lack of a concrete audience means that it lends itself to a certain type of writing (pontification, of which I am notably guilty, especially recently). It’s good at conversation-starting but bad at actual conversation. I am not explaining this well.

Joe also talks about quality differences, and here is where he really nails it. It’s as true today as when he wrote it, and again I offer myself as a prime example. Sure, once in a blue moon I offer some exclusive content — 30 days to a more accessible weblog, the occasional Python script — but day to day, the quality of my chatter is not any higher than the quality of a thousand other people’s chatter. My recent ten-line review of Syndirella is a case in point. No exclusive content, nothing earth-shattering, nothing original. Hit #12 on Daypop. Why?

All other things being equal, people would rather read what everyone else is reading.

Joshua Allen touches on this point too, in his long non-apology, I started writing. He explains it a bit better, I think. Also, he talks about voice, and demographics:

Then the web hit the bigtime, everyone got online, everyone got high-speed access at work, and tools arrived to make tech know-how unnecessary. The weblog — and I’m using the original definition here, namely oft-updated annotated links — became the default personal site. I mean of course: it’s easy content. It’s like when you’re in the office kitchen trying to like maybe quietly enjoy a juice box for once and some guy comes in and starts reading the paper and saying Can you believe that? And: What do you make of that?

A very consistent voice cropped up among the new writers: casual, chatty, inoffensive, usually a dash of false self-deprecation, and a kind of subtle condescension — the sound of someone who has been chosen to pass along valuable information to others. This tone of I am interesting, right? was underscored by the guestbooks and comments and karma points and permalinks and trackbacks and referer logs. Even the current vogue of web standards often boils down to: Everyone should have access to what I have to say, I don’t care if they’re blind or reading my words off a cellphone — the message must get through.

It didn’t help that we all had such similar backgrounds and interests. Although the web keeps diversifying, the kind of person who has the time and money and inclination to maintain a regularly updated personal website still falls into a pretty narrow demographic group, which is how we end up with 10,000 posts about The Two Towers, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, iPods, Volkswagen commercials, etc.

Of course there is diversity, fascinating diversity, but only on the outskirts of the community. Blogdex and Daypop have become boring, and I don’t just say that because I show up there every week. Once you get over the idea of Daypop, the actuality of Daypop is monotonous. Forget about finding original ideas there; it’s conventional wisdom, automated through 10,000 individual voices that all decide — independently and simultaneously — to link to the latest quasi-libertarian rant on Mickey Mouse.

And on re-reading, I just noticed that Josh links to my year in review as an example of the canonical weblog voice bottoming out. I’m not sure what this means, or whether it should disturb me. (The same review has also been called extreme navel-gazing, and several other things of varying degrees of civility and printability. Hey, I enjoy data mining. I don’t have access to a lot of exclusive data, except my own. This is what motivated my experiments with posts by citation and so forth. Suddenly everybody made it out to be some big statement about the Semantic Web, with a capital S. WTF do I care about the Semantic Web? I stumbled onto a tag and I used it. Hixie said I was using it correctly, and that gave me an idea. It’s really not any more complicated than that.)

Meanwhile, Dennis Mahoney: On Lighthouses.

Remember when personal web sites weren’t taken too seriously and, as a result, featured loads of creamy goodness? Me neither, but I remember this time I went to a web site and thought, holy cats, this guy really enjoys lighthouses. I got the feeling this guy was pretty much the alpha and omega of lighthouse appreciation.

… When I first discovered the web, I was struck by all the available space. You could do anything. There could be words, images, sounds, even porn. With a couple of scroll bars, there was blank space of infinite width and height. Infinite. So I built a 3-column personal web site with a logo and a mission statement. A personal site with a logo: I thought I ought to brand the site. Yeah, it makes zero fucking sense.

I’m not going to get all LOGOS ARE EVIL on you. But I was spending time thinking about branding and mission statements for my personal site, when I should have been writing about lighthouses. Well not lighthouses lighthouses, but stuff that really lights me up at the moment. That’s an accidental pun, I swear to God.

Anil Dash thinks I’m whining about the personal web being boring. Nothing could be further from the truth. The personal web is fascinating, because people are fascinating. Never before have we been privy to so many insignificant details of so many unfamous people. I love that one of the people writing Internet standards that applications probably won’t even implement for another 5 years is a Powerpuff Girls fan. That just fucking rocks. I wouldn’t trade that for 10,000 issues of the New York Times.

Here is a Zen koan:

One day Zen Master Bo Wol asked Zen Master Jun Kang, A long time ago, Zen Master Ma Jo said to the assembly, ‘I have a circle. If you enter this circle, I will hit you. If you do not enter this circle, I will also hit you. What can you do?’ So I ask you, Jun Kang, if you had been there, how would you have answered?

Jun Kang replied, I don’t like nonsense. How do I not get hit by Ma Jo’s stick?

Bo Wol answered, Why are you holding Ma Jo’s stick?

Do not misunderstand me. I don’t think the personal web has become boring. I think I have become boring. I’ve spent too much time tracking statistics, living up to the meaningless ideals of others, and pontificating on matters of no importance. When I should have been writing about lighthouses.

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