Blog Fad

mrG — Mon, 31 Mar 2003 06:54:32 -0500

Corante essayist Arnold Kling posts some thoughts on whether blogging is a fad, concluding, of course, that the weblog is a sound and efficient method of information dispersal and therefore here to stay. He's partially right, although when I read things like

Information with low value does not travel far. Information with high general value tends to travel the farthest. Information with low general value but high local value tends to reach interested people but then die out because as it gets passed along its value decays below the threshold.

the very first thing that occurs to me is the number of times I've seen pure bunk posted and then noticed the Technorati listings just lapping it up as if it was the gospel. This is not 'information' in the sense of the semantics that the messages form with words and letters, although it is information in the sense of gaging what we want to believe or who we want to distrust. We don't get any improvement in purity, far from it, we can't even trust what our own mother might post online because we don't know the quality or the reasoning or anything at all about the link, only that it's there.

There is, however, this illusion of purity because arguments like Klings make sense ... and that phrase is one of those that makes the hairs on my neck stand up. When he says "This filtering process makes all of us more efficient." he's not expousing fact, he's asserting belief and while it may very well be true in some cases, it's not an argument, it's at best an anecdote.

So why are blogs so powerful? Or are they powerful?

I believe so, but I don't think the proof is in human factors of efficiency in finding information because it is still a filtre and you will still miss information that was dropped or coloured in the transmission. You might find out very quickly that Mr Rogers has passed away, but it could take years to learn that William S Burroughs passed on or what was decided last week by your local town council. The propagation is swift only for select classes of information, and nothing spreads as fast or as far as pure and utter absurd nonesense -- one trip to Daypop will confirm that.

What is the power of the weblog? It's not in the individual messages, but in the aggregate message, it's not in one link but in ten thousand, in the sense of the statistical or sociological truth. In the Foundation trilogy, Asimov has the Hari Seldon explain that prognostication over one individual is a risky venture, but predictions over large populations can be reliable across long time periods (provided no Mule appears!). The efficiency of information transfer with the weblog is not in the filtering or the speed, but in the gaging of consensus, and this feature is not a social phenomenon, but a technological advance, or more exactly, the mix of the social human use of technology in amid a sea of new technological advances.

Blogging as it exists today is not a thing in itself. The blog phenomenon is largely a side-effect of modern internet technologies. Our conversations and the Internet diary aspects of the blog are only the signal; the carrier is the information space created by RSS, Daypop, PageRank, Blogroll, Technorati, Blogdex, blo.gs, Trackback ...

People have been conversing online since the very start of it; there is no essential content difference between a weblog and a mailing list, both are just as Rebecca Blood describes, a chronological list of largely personal experiences. We've been archiving mailing lists for two decades, half of that as indexed webpages, we've been threading and commenting on discussion forums since 1980's BBS days, yet none of these have gained the "knowledge management" power of the blog because they all lacked the close feedback, reputation/consensus measures and other effects of the modern (largely automated) interconnectedness.

Without the semantic mycelia of the hidden network of blog-connecting technologies, the blog as we now know it would likely not exist, and I don't see any great chances of the world dumping PageRank any time soon. As further evidence of this, notice the rise of services such as RSSify to graft mycelial technologies to the limited (read "crippled") facilities of the early pure-journal services such as Pyra's free BlogSpot, the ubiquitous blogrolling.com or even the mock-trackback of Stephen's Web, all of them features weblog servers like Salon, RadioUserland or Pyra are fools not to implement.

If a blog alone were enough, why then would these blog authors, who are, by definition, interested in painless and simple content management, why would they dive into their templates to add blogrolling javascript or RSSify tags? They do it because they know, as Kling correctly observes, there is a stark and compelling sense of efficiency that more than compensates the annoyance of getting jiggy with the HTML.

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Blog Fad