Blogs to Riches

(except obviously yes it does but they are temporal rather than geographical)

the buried interesting point is that at least i interlinked zones of the net to-be-inspired-by-x = to-add-to-x's-readership (rather than to siphon it off, as you'd expect a competitor to do out in storeworld)

even if you could work for yourself and pull in a passable salary, waking up at dawn in your east village apt each morning to blog about paris hilton and linday lohan.. that just sounds like some awful level of hell.

Cf the main reason why the Times shouldn't have hidden its columnists behind the subscription service: the reason people blog and link and argue about them isn't necessarily that they're better than other papers', it's just that they're what everyone blogs and links and argues about. It's just conversational inertia, really, which seems pretty natural and sensible.

(xpost)

I'm delighted that New York magazine has at last seen fit to talk about Clay Shirky's very important ideas about blogging and power laws. I've spoken about this in several essays (Pluricide, Frankenstein and power laws, and a Wired News piece about blogging) and even started an ILE thread on the subject, Pluricide and power laws (December 2003).

The discussion was mostly between myself and Ann Sterzinger, Ned, Mark S, Nabisco and hstencil apparently preferring to wait two years for New York magazine to talk about power laws in the context of making lots of money before offering opinions on the subject.

On the other hand, small bloggers can mutually benefit by advertising each other -- sort of like how independent booksellers created that "Book Sense" thingamabob.

true, but I guess it's a tragedy of the commons situation. it's much more valuable for each individual blogger to make sycophantic backlinks to the major players, because if even one reciprocates, it's worth several magnitudes of traffic and google indexing more than many links from their peers.

i'm not any huge fan of momus, but his http://imomus.livejournal.com/ looks well rendered and intelligently written. I'm surprised only 17 people link to him (via technorati). Compare that to the lowest common denominator Stereogum, with 5,279 linkers. Plenty of bloggers are out there waiting to latch on to a teat like that.

Ahem, far be it from me to blow my own trumpet, harumph, tata, but my LJ is in the Top 20 of all LiveJournals, as measured by inbound links. I think that 17 figure is something to do with the fact that LJ recently changed all the addresses of LJ users (they now have the format http://username.livejournal.com) and only 17 people have linked to me since that change in protocol (very recent).

It's funny that this article just pretended as though livejournal didn't exist, and accounts for a MASSIVE chunk of that large pool of "c-list" blogs.

there is of course one argument that blows a nice sized hole into much of this. it's likely that the major blogs are so often linked because small time bloggers are using their link list as a de facto bookmarking system for their own convenience.

excluding often read big name blogs for nebulous notions of "justice" while adding in unproven first-timers would make these sorts of bookmark lists pretty worthless.

http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/wgbhscenics/gallery/gallery_images/PBS/NOVA.jpg

http://www.schools.utah.gov/curr/science/teacherresources/pbs.ht2.jpghttp://p2pnet.net/story_images/7310.jpg

I think in retrospect that was a terribly misogynist song, and situation. There I was writing this patronising song for a girl singer, making her ask permission to "tear her playhouse down". Putting that "rebellious" message into her mouth, without her having any input. Left to her own devices, Kahimi wrote songs about trapeze artists and her dog, not about "busting out" of the "dollhouse" of femininity. (Ibsen to thread here.)

"Tell me I'm allowed to play the Fender Jaguar like the Velvet Underground" (a desire to be Sterling Morrison rather than Nico, presumably, though I know which of those I'd rather be) might seem best answered by the quote Madonna spliced into "Justify My Love": "Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another." But that won't do either, because (apart from talking about "the man" rather than "the woman") it's a highly individualist stance which says there's something wrong with dependency and collectivism, both things the Japanese perspective I was trying to put on the Friedan thread celebrates. How about "Rich is the person whose dependence on others is rewarded with kindness"?

(Also, the penis envy hardly needs to be excavated there. What does it mean when a man writes penis envy into a song for a woman?)

Ewwww...

I thought I had read somewhere that it was starting in March? I know tons of ILX people are going to write for it, so how come it's almost May 1st and no launch yet?

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113053/new-york-times-buzzfeed-andrew-sullivan-herald-death-blog#