At Tom's Request

People are popular, author of the above question included, because they were nice to someone, and then another someone, etc. The people who are the "most popular" are the ones who did the above until they were nice to enough people that they showed up on enough websites that newbies felt they were something special. Those of us who can't be fucked to be nice are screwed.

That's not a commentary on the quality of any three people mentioned or their weblogs, it's a vast generalization that you may take as you will.

i don't think it's a question of 'nice.' i think you have to look at the other accomplishments the 'famous' bloggers have done within the web community -- jason and meg alone are two excellent examples of people who have strongly contributed to the noncommercial web, not by putting out their blogs alone, but through other ventures that they might not even touch on in the course of updating their personal web sites.

let's face it. whining about being 'less popular' isn't in any way as important (yes, i am going to make qualitative judgments here) as, say, designing a font or an application that created a huge enough critical mass to even entertain the concept of "weblog popularity", i think. but maybe that is just me.

also, i feel like i've really been here before -- i've had these accusations of "popularity" and "incestuousness" hurled at me in the past, and it's like, well, there usually is a reason for these sorts of things. really. weblogs aren't most of the 'popular' webloggers sole contributions to the web -- although my definition of 'popular' might very well be quite different than yours. when i think popular personal web site, i think justin hall, carl steadman, lance arthur, christine castro, alexis massie, ben brown, and, well, yeah, i think of me, too.

p.s. i still don't like weblogs.

Why should it be surprising that popularity on the web works like it does off the web?

The web was supposed to be for the "cool" kids, the ones who never wanted to be popular -- but give 'em a taste, and they get hooked too. The whole thing about getting readers is sort of ass backwards -- the web is treated as a unit. What readers? To what purpose -- towards influencing events and discourse, or towards ego reasons, or towards... and so on. If things don't make it into "mass consciousness" maybe they weren't meant to be there, and that doesn't mean anything good or bad. Aphorisms for a New World #1: As the ration of filtering to flow increases, content tends towards the approximate audience it deserves.

Since when has this "web was for cool kids" thesis been anything other than something dreamt up by dead-tree media writers? I come more from the demoscene-diskmag/Usenet/Slashdot end of writing articles, and I've never really had high expectations about big audiences! (Well, you can't if you write articles for an ST or Amiga diskmag which gets spread by bbs/FTP/disk copiers, can you?) I've been writing stuff on and off for almost a decade now just to share my opinions with people on whatever scene I've been in at the time. (Whether the demo scene or internet scenes.) Obviously I wouldn't mind getting some dosh for my scribblings, but I started writing stuff for fun...

This "web publishing = the new rock 'n' roll" was started by certain print writers with swollen egos and a lack of knowledge about the web. They widely presume that the net was full of "anoracks" (and therefore by definition, crap) before they logged on, and that by their mere presence, they are bringing some sort of "excitement" and "attitude" not previously seen on this medium. And blow me down if they are not slipping up big time!!!! Even this month we have Select magazine was promoting this ridiculous piece of revisionism whilst introducing a load of "revolutionary" web sites. (ie with the exception of Popbitch, the same old "alternative" and "attitude" sites, one of which is already suffering from "update fatigue"!)

It's interesting to read the reaction to NYTimes article tho... Particularly given that I think one of the Pyra folks was partly responsible for nominating my blog as "Blog of the Week"!

Michael.

That was kind of my point, what Josh said. It works exactly how it works in real life, except in real life people who are cute are also the most popular, which doesn't work online unless people see you, which most people don't. Weblogs are the same as BBSes, are the same as regular webpages, etc. I was very popular on BBSes because I was one of the cutest ones, and no matter how mean I was to those psycho freaks (erm, sorry if they're reading this, I'm just kidding), I was popular. The people who were extra intelligent and had good posts to add were not necessarily popular because being intelligent doesn't make you popular.

Bullshit, incidentally, about having made contributions to the web, whatever that means. Do you think 90% of newbies care or notice that these people have made contributions? Most likely not. They read them because they are popular. Again, the BBS comparison: I had more net friends than the people actually working on the damned thing in some cases. It was very strange to me that I could post any old crap ("I like...ice cream!!!!") and get a reply, but no one paid attention to some really good stuff about music or politics or whatever.

So, yeah, it works exactly like real life. Ain't no one giving a crap about your contributions to the world or how smart you are, because that's not what would make you popular in real life. The net is populated by humans, and the way humans pick their most popular members has already been set in stone.

The real question is of course why did anyone care? I was clueless to the "controversy" until I read this post, and I didn't read the article in New Yorker. I'd actually like that question answered far more than I'd want Fred's self-congratulatory-plug-masquerading-as- Tom's-question answered ;)