Blogging and its discontents. Atrios has posted a rather, shall we say, intemperate email he received from blogger Ron (not fucking Roy) Brynaert, complaining at a lack of recognition within the blogosphere generally (and specifically at Eschaton) for his work on the "Jeff Gannon"/Talon News story. (I haven't taken the time to review Ron (not fucking Roy)'s blog to know just what that work is, and to what extent merited recognition is eluding it.)

i might still like your writing...but i am fucking going to continue to attack you fuckers for the unethical way you choose to operate...

you won't fucking link to me...no matter what...will you? ...

A lot of people are reading me now, Duncan (for the first time I'm using your name). You have one last fucking chance to realize that you are making a mistake by being a fucking elitist douchebag...and start giving links to smaller blogs like me...and responding to your emails...or I am going to blog about this. ...

YOU ELITIST BLOGGERS ARE HURTING OUR CAUSE BY BEING PETTY CIRCLE JERKERS!!!!!!!

Ron Brynaert (ron not fucking roy)

I can't imagine expressing myself this way, but I'll admit to a certain amount of fellow-feeling for Ron (not fucking Roy), as proprietor of a small—hell, tiny—blog that Atrios has never noticed, even when it's alerted him in polite emails to interesting things said about matters that he typically concerns himself with. But that's beside the point of this post, which is one (or an installment of one) I've been meaning to make for a while now.

Blogging, at least in the public-affairs space (but no doubt in most others), is beset with ego traps. All authorship is beset with ego traps, of course, but blogging may very well have created some new ones, or given a new twist to the old ones. Roy appears to be suffering from what I think of as Power Law Madness: a condition caused by the mismatch between one's expectation of a flat landscape of information choice and the reality of the power-law distribution in blogging.

It's a fair question whether attention is more unequally distributed in the blog space than in the print world—I'm guessing it is, given how much freer choice is (in the economic sense) on the Web: network theory forces the counterintuitive conclusion that power-law curves are steeper the more options there are to choose from, and the fewer impediments there are to making choices. Add to this the fact that HTTP itself, along with the secondary tools that have grown up around blogging, makes it possible for a blog author to know in almost real time how big an audience he has and what they're looking at.

I don't know how many times it's happened that I've made what I think of as a particularly cogent post, then sat back and watched the traffic not move, and wondered why the hell nobody was reading/linking this—never mind what I actually know about how attention moves on the Web. One of the reasons I took a hiatus last year was because I began to see that I was getting a little nuts about traffic: too much time monitoring my tracking database, too much emotional attachment to the state of the moving average of my daily hits. (Embarrassing as all this is to mention—especially given that my high average of traffic, just before I left off, was barely 150 page hits a day.) I'm a Zen practitioner, and it took me a while but it dawned on me that while with one hand I was working very patiently to defeat my ego, with the other I was constantly stoking it. The first thing I did, when I realized I wanted to start posting regularly again, was to shut off my tracking script and make myself promise not to turn it on again—if I'd had real strength of mind I'd have opted out of the Salon tracking as well, but that's so crippled in functionality that it almost doesn't make a difference.

Anyway, Ron (not fucking Roy), good luck to you. You may get yourself to a new readership plateau, now that Duncan's linked to you. (No such thing as bad publicity, after all.) Just don't let it make you crazy: readership, except as it leads to conversation, is only an imaginary reward anyway. Oh, and learn to use capital letters when you email.

posted by michael  5:19:16 PM  
tell me about it []