Still, it has occured to me that I should make more of an effort to be positive in my thoughts and words. And I do believe in blog karma…

Nice headline though, you certainly pulled me in. I didn’t click on any ads though :P Even though it was a nice headline, I am now less likely to fall for any other of your headlines in future, as my faith in the quality of your content has dropped.

As an additional read you might like to check out what I wrote about the situation in the Dutch blogosphere.

I’ve also come across blogs that mostly post about posts, without the added value of serving as an index or filter. I think that they’re more typical of the blogging-for-volume mania that has affected the community. I’d bet that even when you only have time to “read and share the article”, that kind of post is interspersed with thoughtful and original posts.

That’s not necessarily true. This style of “posting” came from academia, I know for sure it did for me, where posting a title of an article with abstract is common practice (ie. searching for journal articles). When I started one of my earlier weblogs there were few people discussing and sharing the important literature of our field. Finding some cool research was invaluable and why I visited weblogs. It’s a bit different now but I still appreciate the format. I don’t always have time to do more than read and share the article.

Memorable Quotes from Sunset Boulevard. (1950)

Joe Gillis: You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.
Norma Desmond: I *am* big. It’s the *pictures* that got small.

Norma Desmond: They took the idols and smashed them, the Fairbankses, the Gilberts, the Valentinos! And who’ve we got now? Some nobodies!

Norma Desmond: We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!

Even with the organic growth that made all three sites popular, there are now millions of users who are not invested in the culture that the creators nurtured. Site-wide cultural cohesion starts to disintegrate. Sub-cultures with conflicting values form within the site. Managing this is hard for both the users and the creators. Design decisions are made to stop certain behaviors, but they simultaneously limit the good things that others can do.

Remember usenet, before the masses discovered it? Likewise slashdot and Ward’s wiki (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki/), and lots of other places that I haven’t been a part of. At some point, the effort required to explain, demonstrate, inundate, and yes, sometimes enforce, the culture and etiquette.

Blogs are different, because they’re (mostly) separate sites with arbitrarily overlapping sets of readers. Blogs are the same, because of the volume problem. There’s at least two dimensions to the volume, one being the sheer number of blogs being created. The other is the obsession with posting. It takes effort to post quality material. That’s really difficult to do to a deadline, and even harder if the competition is fierce.

Two types of really easy posts to write? 1) Here’s this really cool link, but I’m not going to say much about it other than that its cool, and I’ll quote swathes of it to make this entry look bulky. 2) Here’s this really lame link/person/site, so I’ll cut into it/them without saying anything helpful to anyone. Actually, it might not be all that lame, but they’re famous so I’ll get some links and maybe some readers, and besides, my posting rate is low for the day.

As long as it’s easier to post trash than quality, and as long as the blogosphere rewards quantity with readership, I suspect that low quality is going to be the norm, and negativity will form a large part of that low quality. For the rest of us, that makes it easier to stand out from the crowd with a lower volume of consistent quality posts.

I don’t know how it will pan out, but I think that the fact that blogs are usually loosely affiliated means that the quality non-negative blogs will form a separate part of the blogosphere, and will evolve separately from the mainstream. That’s how it started, after all.

In the world of knitting or knitting-sweaters-for-kittens blogs, snarkiness or negativity probably doesn’t have a place. When dealing with more controversial topics (politics or even tech), going on the offensive against someone who’s wrong or doing damage might indeed be necessary.

Generally most A-, B-, C- and D-List Bloggers should take a break anyway. Substance need inspiration and self reflection – both traits are not well cultivated.

On Dave Winner – just because he invented stuff doesn’t mean he is a protected species. He wrote a lot of crap too.

Overall the blogosphere takes itself way to serious for my taste. It also is a bunch of networked nitwits and shoulder slapping pals. The posts surrounding the recent SXSW event on various blogs and those really stupid blogger awards demonstrate that quality is not really important around ‘here’ – being pals with the right people is.

But that happens everywhere anyway …

“Blogosphere” and “A-List Bloggers”, such meaningless jargon.

I recently asked for opinions from an online forum, and one guy suggested I change the “soap-box” tone. Ouch! At least, I didn’t take that as being a positive thing.

However, in the end, my goal for the blog is to help young entrepreneurs learn. I don’t know how else I can go about tone-wise.

Pros: Blogging is becoming more mainstream, and discussions between bloggers are becoming wider, allowing for more opinions. Cons: It’s allowing unprofessional people into the blogosphere, people who have nothing worthwhile to contribute, people whose only purpose is to pull others down. Crappy blogs are also being created (you know the ones), making it harder to find the worthwhile ones.

I fear for blogging. In the future I see it becoming so common that it collapses under its own weight, kinda like the dot com bubble burst. Many of you may not share my pessimistic view on the future of blogging, but isn’t that what makes blogging beautiful, TRUE freedom of expression?

In the hip hop blogging world we saw an early generation of magazine writers and other thoughtful folks with whom I was happy to be associated. Many of the next wave attacked the previous wave to build their reputations. Interestingly enough, this was also a strategy for starting one’s career that one of my grad advisers suggested, though without the venom of many bloggers.

Because of rap’s history of disses and insults, it’s not surprising that we find a lot of negativity there. What’s sad is that one of the most well known bloggers in hip hop built his reputation off attacks, false documents posted online, racist/homophobic humor, etc. His readership is not what you’d expect, i.e. many of his fans are well educated, some even are activists. I find it puzzling but folks are seeing that attacks, Gawker-esque nonsense and so forth makes money.

More generally, I believe we see so much negativity on the web because we’re hearing the voices of those who would not normally get much attention because they’re unwilling to soften their edges to fit in or, they have to submit so much in workplace settings that they have a lot of anger to get out.

It also seems related somehow to the phenomenon that in teaching, one’s most negative attacks mostly come in the form of anonymous teacher evaluations. Somehow the web has created a platform that a lot of things that people have been scared to say publicly can now say. I could go on but I’ve written too much.

My biggest complaint with Winer wasn’t what he contributes but how he contributed. My way or the highway. If he didn’t like something, he grouched and grumped about it like the whole blog world was supposed to stop and cater to his opinion. The iTunes RSS spec was one such example (though to his credit, he’s right about his complaints there).

The fact is the blogosphere is bigger than any one man. It is a living, breathing, evolving place and Dave just didn’t seem to be able to cope with the shifting landscape.

But the beauty of the Internet is that 99.9% of all of these attacks, insults, and the like are all nothing but hot-air from angry people. Unless my reputation is on the line (which isn’t much to speak of), or i’m in physical harm, then I’ll just choose to let these people turn blue in the face with their tantrums, while I go enjoy an ice-cream cone or something equally as good….

Vic