Justin & Jane on mobile media

"It is eerie to me how I am in the exact same thought-space as they are, looking at the exact same websites."

It's the nature of a closed community. Ever lived in a small town or been part of a small group? Everyone knows everyone else. Anything said in the group - mysteriously - seems profound and unique.

tom: you have said something very very true.
the whole blogger sphere is heavily incestuous.
they all mention each other. they all heap praise on each other. they all share the same thought-space.
yr analogy to a small town is great. i like it very much.
ofcourse, such a comment is wasted, since the only people who will think it valid and worth discussing are in fact those who live outside this thought-space, the true, new foreigners.

From the stats on weblogs.com, in the best possible statistics, the total number of weblogs looks like roughly 12,000. With hyper-logging (ie five updates/day), this number could be much smaller.

So why all the hype? What's the story?

Weblogging (although dating back to the origins of the internet) has been pushed recently as the post-2000 technology one-to-watch - the new means of communication, the next big thing.

Although the software to create weblogs is really simple (I wrote my own in an afternoon). A couple of companies have been pushing their market value based on the sexy-media-hype. Technology media has been relatively devoid of intellectual analysis. Technology journalism is now governed by the press release rather than fact-checking.

So for the outsider, or even those who maintain weblogs for practical means but are out of the in-crowd, the whole thing can seem a little alien.

What concerns me, is that weblogs are a normalising force. They aren't about pushing out new ideas or being heard, there about reinforcing existing media outlets with links, or talking about the mundane. Just more of the same...

yes.
its about content. it always has been and is, no matter what the medium is.
100 cable channels: worth watching, maybe 3.
150 satalite channels: worth watching, maybe 2.
12,000 blogs: worth reading, maybe ?
maybe the difference is that it costs millions to put up a cable television station, but it cost only 50 to put up a blog.
yes, yes, freedom of speech. right to express oneself. all well and good, but really what blogging is about more than anything else right now, is, simply, the new ability to parade yrself in front of anyone who can stand to watch. this requires the reader to be able to stomach uninteresting personal details about oneself, which, are mostly badly written anyway.
forums for ideas? not really.
just more of a way to circulate and verify ones own taste level and crave for recognition.
blogging mirrors our societies.
blogging will become the way that misfits otherwise socialize.

Well, I hate to interrupt your own cozy little circle-jerk here, boys, but this sentence of Tom's:

"They aren't about pushing out new ideas or being heard, there about reinforcing existing media outlets with links, or talking about the mundane."

is so manifestly absurd it hardly needs to be challenged. Never one to shirk my responsibilities, tho', I'll challenge it anyway.

In the last sixty days, and very much inside the contours of your "incestuous little town," I've seen a lot of discussion about nothing less than reengineering Western democracy. I've seen a lot of thoughtful insight and commentary into a new medium of personal communication/wayfinding, the volume of which spiked so quickly that an international conference was mooted and pounced upon. And I've read a great deal of extremely knowledgable insight concerning the subtle workings of human communities, of which your bitter screeds above read as sort of a sophomoric parody.

What'samatter, nobody asked you to the dance?

Interesting points Adam - on content, maybe I am reading the wrong logs. I would like to add some clarification.

"a new medium of personal communication"

I have been reading weblogs of one form or another since 1996. I have two of my own which I use for different purposes - my shoes are warn from dancing.

I am glad you enjoy reading weblogs. I enjoy reading weblogs too. My concern is with the size of the community and how this can be exploited. This doesn't appear to be talked about critically. There is no real analysis of the community - bar the hype which seems to be intertwined with personal emotions (dedicated webloggers) and corporations (press releases/tool ownership).

It is good to have the opportunity to talk about it. Thanks to Gen for providing the forum.

"my shoes are worn from dancing"

Ahh, I understand. It happens to all of us.

Yeah, I dunno, maybe you simply *have* been reading the wrong blogs. There's been plenty of self-critical and analytical writing (even self-accusatory writing) regarding the feedback loops and closed circuits than can sometimes feel as if they constitute blogdom in its entirety. Did you see any of the commentary about power laws earlier this year?

In fact, if I have any advice for you, Tom, it's to plunge deeper - the signal *is* waiting there amid the noise. As for our niji...having followed your spoor of bitter commentary across three sites now, I can safely say you add nothing to any of these conversations. If you hate this whole phenomenon so much, why don't you just go right on ahead and fuck off, hmm?