Would it be possible/feasible to share stats among web logs?

April 2, 2002 5:54 AM

Maybe you will even be mocked in a medium that people actually read. Ouch! I wonder if it would be possible/feasible to share stats among web logs. I'd bet that the combined readership a few blogs would beat the readership figures of mid-size newspapers like the Boston Globe.
posted by dchase to bugs at 5:54 AM (84 comments total)

Arrrgh- sorry. This was meant for "weblog related".
posted by dchase at 5:55 AM on April 2, 2002

Heh. They said "Blogistan." New buzzword of the week!

And when you say readership, do you mean paper syndication readership or web based readership, or both?
posted by insomnyuk at 6:00 AM on April 2, 2002

Why can't dead media get their brains around the concept of wrapping an href around a URL?
posted by machaus at 6:07 AM on April 2, 2002

Well, hon, I just learned to do that last week.
posted by bunnyfire at 6:19 AM on April 2, 2002

Funny how most of the blogs mentioned are those written by journalists. But then, another cloying attribute of journalists is their intense admiration for other journalists. It goes without saying that Beam includes a reference to Sullivan's publications, The New Republic and The New York Times Magazine, in journalism's infinite echo chamber of self-regard.
posted by rory at 6:31 AM on April 2, 2002

Another week, another weblog article. It'll be fun to watch it climb to the top of the charts at Blogdex.

Good point, Rory. As incestuous as they make webloggers out to be, they're doubly so.

posted by iconomy at 6:42 AM on April 2, 2002

I can't say I'm surprised to see this; it's the sort of thing I see all the time over here on the ink side; it seems to be some kind of literary penis envy.

The fact of the matter is, all writers are attention whores - that goes from the Top-50 bestseller writer to the 25-eyeball-per-day weblogger. We're all out here waving and shouting, trying to show the world (or at least those who are not terminally disinterested) how eloquent, witty, germane, timely, etc. we are.

When it comes to publication, print versus web, there seems to be the same kind of cattiness as you secretly always suspected existed between Mary Ann and Ginger. Local print publication can lead to an amount of local notoriety and hometown fame; a nice ego boost for them. We can't claim that out here; our audience is too dispersed. Even working for a umbrella site for three Philly suburban newspapers, the best we can boast is 1.5M page views a month, and we cooked those numbers down to probably 25,000 steady readers. Not enough to keep a shopper's guide in publication.

On the other hand, when I get one of my better projects out (with sufficient time for the search engines to catch and disperse), I pull readers spread over 81 countries for the month the project is active. The kids on the newspaper side see that, and start to think of themselves as a little... limited in geographical scope.

So it goes back and forth - with this op piece a perfect example of what ends up happening. Ask yourself this question: do you suppose there is not just a little cry of attention here? A little sour grapes mixed in his whine?

Believe it.


posted by Perigee at 7:05 AM on April 2, 2002

Good point Rory--and at the Globe they're very sensitive to the special treatment earned by established writers.


posted by BT at 7:08 AM on April 2, 2002

Of all the webloggers to pick on for being mundane and trivial, I can't believe this guy settled on James Lileks. The Bleat is great -- he's one of the only journalists I can think of who could pull off a daily newspaper column.
posted by rcade at 7:21 AM on April 2, 2002

The fact of the matter is, all writers are attention whores - that goes from the Top-50 bestseller writer to the 25-eyeball-per-day weblogger.

It isn't easy to appeal to the one-eyed reader market, either.

Come on, folks. Even if he's living in something of a glass house, you have to admit that he has a point. You all must know bloggers who never really ask themselves, "Is there any point in my saying this?" The Web has opened up outlets for a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise have as much of a voice, but the price we've paid is a decided increase in self-importance and pomposity. It's easy enough not to read the blogs that speak just for the sake of speaking, but let's admit that they're out there.
posted by anapestic at 7:26 AM on April 2, 2002

Also, the readership estimates for the Boston Globe indicate a readership of just under 1.5 million. It's going to take a lot of blogs to equal that.
posted by anapestic at 7:31 AM on April 2, 2002

Funny thing is that he's right. Even the self-proclaimed champions of blog punditry, the ones with reputations established outside the web, struggle to get five-figure hit counts, and that's with a whole lotta blogrolling. And as those champions peep into wider scrutiny from established publications, they'll be forced to face the rather valid criticism that no matter what the slant, they really are working in a rather small "echo chamber of self-regard", as opposed to the gargantuan one established by print media. Total perspective vortex time. It's going to be like pissing into a hurricane. Let's just say that John Pilger, with a potential readership of a few million via the Mirror, is about as worried by Instapundit as an elephant being bitten by a gnat.
posted by riviera at 7:31 AM on April 2, 2002

[anapestic:] You all must know bloggers who never really ask themselves, "Is there any point in my saying this?"

Sure, but then we all know plenty of people who never ask themselves that. I also know plenty of bloggers who I wish would write more but who exercise judicious restraint, because they know that less is more -- Beam himself even acknowledges that such bloggers exist -- and yet article after article of this kind suggests that all or most weblogs are fluff. Perhaps they are, if all you're looking at is absolute numbers of every weblog ever started, even if its author abandoned it after two weeks (how many of those are included in the half-a-million-weblogs statistics?). But most of the weblogs in my own infinite echo-chamber of self-regard, er, links page, have been around a long while now, and post consistently well -- at least as consistently as your average weekly newspaper columnist who has to write 800 words on something, anything, every week.
posted by rory at 7:39 AM on April 2, 2002

He might be kind of right riviera, but it is HIS attention that makes him wrong. There are a million lunatics claiming that their form of self-expression is the most valid, why is HE taking blogging seriously enough to be bitter about it? Bad bloggers, bad writers , bad filmmakers - some of them slip through and gain attention on a large scale. The nature of the artist is that s/he questions the art being created. "What's the point of all of this" is what produces art. Perhaps he thinks that some of his colleagues' blogs are bad. Perhaps he thinks that blogs aren't a valid form of art. Those perceptions are valid, but his defensive defending of his newspaper in relation to blogs smells. My parents aren't reading blogs yet, but now the are reading articles about blogs. Who is pissing where?
posted by goneill at 7:47 AM on April 2, 2002

[Lileks is] one of the only journalists I can think of who could pull off a daily newspaper column.

Well, actually, it's thrice-weekly, but I imagine he could pull off a daily if he wasn't always rushing off to Target. ;-)
posted by bradlands at 7:55 AM on April 2, 2002

The fact of the matter is, all writers are attention whores - that goes from the Top-50 bestseller writer to the 25-eyeball-per-day weblogger.

I'm a 25-eyeball-per-day weblogger. I'm read by 12 regular folks and 1 pirate.
posted by jonmc at 7:57 AM on April 2, 2002

I was waiting for this article. Did you see the email Lileks got from the guy? He included a snippet -- "James, weren't you once a talented humor writer? Why are you churning out this web dreck?..." -- in today's Bleat.

"Over the weekend, for instance, Postrel posted a link to Norwegian revolutionary (!) Bjorn Staerk 's bizarre recommitment to left-wing raving..."

I'd never heard of Bjorn Staerk until today and it only took a few minutes to see that the page is an April Fool's joke.
posted by nikzhowz at 8:02 AM on April 2, 2002

Why can't dead media get their brains around the concept of wrapping an href around a URL?

Because their sites are supposed to be sticky. It's not about convenience for their reader, but rather keeping your attention focused on their article.
posted by elvissinatra at 8:03 AM on April 2, 2002

jonmc, you just made me change my screensaver. ~SMILE~ You've got the quote of the week.
posted by Perigee at 8:05 AM on April 2, 2002

I read your weblog every day, jon, and although I hate talking about it, I am a cyclops. So make that 24 eyeballs.
posted by iconomy at 8:05 AM on April 2, 2002

The joy of blogging is the writing....if somebody reads it it's gravy. I confess I just don't get all the controversy surrounding blogging and webjournals....we can do it, so we DO. What's the problem? No one is holding a gun to someone's head to read a blog if the writing is poor...and if a person writes and keeps on writing surely the writing will get better???

And as far as newspapers are concerned, as long as there are birdcages and fishmarkets, there will be print journalism.
posted by bunnyfire at 8:17 AM on April 2, 2002

Weblogs != journalism. I wish we could go back to the old days of blogging before the journalists "discovered" it.

Sure, some weblogs are a form of journalism, but I'm tired of this tripe.
posted by camworld at 8:29 AM on April 2, 2002

what can i say? weblogs are mostly people's journals wherein they write small things that interest them. they are notes-to-self; attacking them seems as pointless as the content he objects to. it would be better if he chose to critique those weblogs with artistic goals, for at least in that case Beam could argue that this or that website has fallen short of its aims.
posted by moz at 8:35 AM on April 2, 2002

Well, actually, it's thrice-weekly, but I imagine he could pull off a daily if he wasn't always rushing off to Target.

I've seen that column, but I'm afraid to start reading it because I'm already spending enough time as it is on The Bleat.
posted by rcade at 8:35 AM on April 2, 2002

Well I posted this link on the main page without checking here first. Damn, damn, damn!

Sorry.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 8:36 AM on April 2, 2002

I'm read by 12 regular folks and 1 pirate.

Arrrr, jonmc, ye said ye wouldn't talk about me!

Lash him to the yardarm, Stavros!
posted by Kafkaesque at 8:54 AM on April 2, 2002

For those of you who don't read Beam regularly, he writes about pretty much everything like that - he's sort of a gentle curmudgeon who criticizes pretty much everything, but never to the point where you'd want to punch him. He treats WGU, um, Harvard, the same way.
posted by agaffin at 9:19 AM on April 2, 2002

Three things: 1. He's right -- if webloggers would only edit themselves a little, and restrain themselves from posting just for the sake of having posted when they don't actually have anything to say, blogs would be much more worthwhile.

2. It doesn't really matter, to any given blogger. These are people's personal projects, they can do what they want. Sure, I'd read more blogs, more often if they cut the self-masturbatory crap and the blogrolling and the mediocre posts, but what's that to them? Clearly, they're not writing for me. That's up to them, isn't it?

3. Beam's main point, in his conclusion, is that the way weblogs are written, they're not going to get many readers, relative to reliable publications. This is valid, and while his tone is harsh, and there's plenty in his writing to attack, it is notable as a separate issue for weblogs in general.

For instance, I don't trust many of the recommendations bloggers give, with respect to what other blogs to read, because links seem to be based on who's linked to you, and who's your friend -- not, who's actually worth reading. And there are extremely few blogs that I actually expect to be good on any given day. I'm reading blogs less and less often, these days, because of it.

Sure, everyone in the "blogging community" thinks it's great, but imagine you're coming from the outside, as most people are. All the David Gallagher links and What is Real phone numbers and endless rambles about hanging out in L.A. with other bloggers and pictures of your dog and oblivious praises of other bloggers doing the same just make otherwise interesting writers seem like quaint caricatures, tedious to read and rarely rewarding.

There's a reason why publications have editors, and why editors cancel stories that don't measure up, and send reporters back to their desks. It's because there's a big difference between a reader and a fan -- and most people are (potential) readers, not fans. There are lots of blogs these days with thousands of fans, and hundreds of thousands of hits. But how many readers do they have? How many people actually read what they say and expect a certain standard of quality? And who are actually disappointed when they don't get that standard of quality?

I don't fault any single blogger for writing all and only the things that tickle his/her fancy. But, given that that's pretty much all the vast majority of bloggers does, the indignation and the defensiveness in response the suggestion that blogging has its faults, and -- especially this -- the notion that blogging is some sort of threat to legitimate publications that actually strive to deliver quality to their readers, is mystifying to me. Sure, the grassroots publishing model is powerful, but this incarnation of it is hardly compelling to anyone except bloggers, who are too blinded by their own modest successes to consider for a moment that the value of their pet projects is crippled by their being just that, pets -- and dwarfed by any publication that takes its readers seriously, instead of itself.
posted by mattpfeff at 9:39 AM on April 2, 2002

Funny thing is that he's right. Even the self-proclaimed champions of blog punditry, the ones with reputations established outside the web, struggle to get five-figure hit counts, and that's with a whole lotta blogrolling.

Ah, but which five figures? We all know that having 50,000 readers, all located in Dubuque, Iowa, means a lot less to one's reputation and relevance than having all 50,000 readers in Manhattan and DC media and political circles. (Well, unless you live in Dubuque, in which case you'd probably have already established yourself as a demigod.) And of course, we have to question whether or not the media/political circles are the ones with whom all warbloggers are attempting to establish said relevance. Most probably are, I admit, but all of them?

Anyway, I'd venture that just about anything Andrew Sullivan writes on his blog ends up having almost as much, if not as much, impact as when he writes the same thing in his New York Times Magazine column. He's probably the only one so lucky at this point, but the numbers will grow. Will any single blog ever end up getting the ~1 million readers/say that the biggest newspapers get? Probably not. But again, it depends on just how many (ick, I hate this phrase) "decision makers" end up reading your blog. If your ideas end up getting planted in the right brains, you've succeeded. The circulations of magazines like National Review, The New Republic, The Atlantic etc are quite small, but the articles they print and the memes they foment disseminate far wider than their subscriber levels would ever suggest at first glance. It's all in who's reading your stuff. And, unluckily for the Alex Beams of the world, it is precisely those "decision maker" types that are catching on to warblogs most quickly, and thus will be first to start preferring them over the generic empty "oh geez what'll I write about today" carping of the average newspaper columnist when (not if) enough excellent writers start blogging regularly.

Also, we're all assuming that the best bloggers won't eventually be eaten up by newspapers and "mainstream media" web sites anyway. I believe many of them will, in far more prominent fashion than the current singular example of the "Fox Weblog" (buried on their opinion page and given no advertising). Voila, instant million readers, reputation and "relevance."

Let's just say that John Pilger, with a potential readership of a few million via the Mirror, is about as worried by Instapundit as an elephant being bitten by a gnat.

Perhaps. But that's because he's getting paid no matter how bad the tripe is that he turns in. (Nothing personal, but you know what I think of him, riviera.) He, and all other hack writers, don't need to fear the circulation of the warblogger; they need to fear the talent. And big-city newspaper editors, the ones most looking for talent (well, in theory anyway) DO tend to fit into that "decision maker" demographic I speak of. Eventually, some big-name-but- bad-prose columnist is going to get dumped for some 2000-hit-per-day nobody of a warblogger. Then they'll start to worry.

Sure, some weblogs are a form of journalism, but I'm tired of this tripe.

Weblogs in general != warblogs as sneered at by Beam. (I referred to these as "first generation blogs" vs "second generation blogs" somewhere recently, but some interpreted that as an insult, so perhaps I should come up with a better comparison.)

Funny how most of the blogs mentioned are those written by journalists. But then, another cloying attribute of journalists is their intense admiration for other journalists. It goes without saying that Beam includes a reference to Sullivan's publications, The New Republic and The New York Times Magazine, in journalism's infinite echo chamber of self-regard.

Yup. If there's anything stopping a lot of potential bloggers from hopping on the bandwagon, it's seeing the :::cough::: "real writer" bloggers constantly circle the wagons and kiss each others' asses instead of highlighting newbies. If you think you're going to have no hope whatsoever of ever getting noticed because you're a housewife instead of a network news division president's latest darling or otherwise connected, you're not going to start at all. And then we're all the worse for it. This by far is the worst thing the A-list warbloggers do. (Though a few of them have been getting a tiny bit better lately about giving plugs to sites that actually need it; SDB in particular is good at this, having entirely dumped his list of Instapundit-level blogs for those he thinks don't get the hit counts they deserve.
posted by aaron at 9:40 AM on April 2, 2002

Also, the readership estimates for the Boston Globe indicate a readership of just under 1.5 million. It's going to take a lot of blogs to equal that.

Pesty, surely you know the difference between a newspaper's "readership" and how many people read a particular columnist's words during a given week.

I work at a newspaper, and I know there are not insignificant number of writers here who don't get as many readers (on the web) as I do in a week on my weblog. And there are none whom I haven't exceeded in online audience at one point or another. So in my mind, the only thing keeping me from having an audience as large as theirs is my disinterest in seeing my words in print in the paper.

And Beam must really, truly, be quite poorly hung. I've rarely seen such profound insecurity, even among faux-curmudgeonly writers. Perhaps we should stop referring to his output as a "column" so we can take away some of the psychological damage we're undoubtedly inflicting when he's required to produce a few column inches every week.
posted by anildash at 9:44 AM on April 2, 2002

Pesty, surely you know the difference between a newspaper's "readership" and how many people read a particular columnist's words during a given week.

I'm sure there is a big difference, but I was responding to what was said in the post, about comparing the readerships of blogs with mid-sized newspapers: "I'd bet that the combined readership a few blogs would beat the readership figures of mid-size newspapers like the Boston Globe."

Besides, in terms of Web readership, don't people play a lot of the same games? You can really only count hits/page views/whatever, right? Do you have a good way to measure how many people actually read your blog? I'm not doubting your claim about getting more readers on your blog than some writers at your newspaper; I just don't know how you'd be able to tell with any reliability.
posted by anapestic at 9:52 AM on April 2, 2002

Why doesn't he fess up to the Boston Globe's own Weblog?
posted by GaelFC at 9:55 AM on April 2, 2002

I just don't know how you'd be able to tell with any reliability.

Well, in Anil's defense, you read the Voice for the ads, not the edge-of-Marxism editorial features. <grin>
posted by aaron at 10:07 AM on April 2, 2002

I wrote him a letter. You can too.

I think you really missed the point of weblogging for regular old nerds like myself [andrewsullivan.com be damned]. I run a library related weblog at librarian.net. Librarians are a fractured profession, they don't get to hang out with eachother too much because most smaller libraries only
have one or two professionals. It can be tough to have your only access to news or the ideas of other librarians be the professional media because even if it's more researched, it's only *one voice*. This is especially true for the library press.

I run librarian.net. it's a place where me and people who share my interests can mull over links about what's happening in the days news. Weblogging is NOT reporting, but it's editorializing [some to a large, others to a smaller degree] what is showing up in the news. Sometimes it's more journal-style, as with another website I keep at www.jessamyn.com/journal [for reference only, i don't care if you read my site or not].

A lot of us are friends just like you probably have a lot of friends who work in media, or are reporters. We meet at the same occasions, use the same tools, have similar interests. It's no big deal. Why you feel the need to read them and then berate them is beyond me, it's clearly not a medium for you. Unlike the Paper of Record, say, which you can't escape and still get the daily news, weblogs are all disposable. Skip em if you don't like them. You just seem like one of those people who hates NPR but won't turn off the radio. Maybe you should go read a book?

jessamyn west
librarian.net


posted by jessamyn at 10:28 AM on April 2, 2002

Elvissinatra:Because their sites are supposed to be sticky. It's not about convenience for their reader, but rather keeping your attention focused on their article.

I really question this. These articles get posted here often, and almost every time it happens, it's obvious that there is some selective linking going on to particular sites, while others get left as plain text.
At the very least, this piece was consistent in not actually linking anyone.
posted by Su at 10:44 AM on April 2, 2002

anapestic: Besides, in terms of Web readership, don't people play a lot of the same games? You can really only count hits/page views/whatever, right? Do you have a good way to measure how many people actually read your blog?

you can never be sure, but you're right that hits and pageviews are useless measures unless you're serving up ads.

however, a program that can track those things can also track unique IPs, which is the closest thing to knowing how many actual visitors you have on a given day.

it takes quite a bit more finagling to estimate what your core audience is. lots of people come to my site following a hit for "laura bush naked" for example; I don't imagine they stick around long or ever come back. others come for money origami or stain removal, and they may never take a look at my weblog--though a few of them do.

in short, I can know about how many people visit my site during a day, but I can't know for sure how many of them come on a regular basis, or how much they read while they're there.
posted by rebeccablood at 11:14 AM on April 2, 2002

I'm not doubting your claim about getting more readers on your blog than some writers at your newspaper; I just don't know how you'd be able to tell with any reliability.

I know all the individual measures are inaccurate. But I can look at the same type of stats on our work servers and on my own personal server and compare them. They're not good in the absolute, but I figure they're pretty useful for relative measures.

My larger point wasn't about me or my audience size, though, it goes much deeper to the point that Jessamyn raises: I think most people with weblogs have they audience they want, not just a huge, undifferentiated audience.

not the edge-of-Marxism editorial features

Sadly, Aaron, I agree with you, all grinning aside. There's been far too much "this is what's wrong" without the accompanying "this is how to make things better". That being said, I am glad there is still an intrinsic contrariness. Most media outlets would do well to adopt that.
posted by anildash at 11:23 AM on April 2, 2002

Aren't columnists pretty much the print equivalent of bloggers, really? I mean, they write daily (or every other day,) have some pet issues but are otherwise unfocused, and they're not generally considered Journalism (note the capital J) but rather the fluff of the newspaper. The only difference I see is their choice of medium, and many are making the leap, as noted by Beam himself.

Perhaps he's just fearful he'll be out of a job soon, once newspapers realize they could syndicate some bloggers' content for a lot cheaper than paying his salary. Job insecurity will bring out some interesting traits in people.
posted by me3dia at 11:43 AM on April 2, 2002

you can never be sure, but you're right that hits and pageviews are useless measures unless you're serving up ads.

however, a program that can track those things can also track unique IPs, which is the closest thing to knowing how many actual visitors you have on a given day

Combine that with a web stats package that can estimate average page view times -- noting page hit to page hit timestamps and calculating the lag as "view" time -- you can get pretty darn specific. So if you wanted to slice web readership numbers even finer, it would always be possible to exclude, say, any >15 sec. pageviews from the number-of-people-who-have-read-this-article total.
posted by nstop at 12:12 PM on April 2, 2002

Alex Beam fears for his job. So does every overedited windbag suddenly aware of his own deficiencies, realizing that some of the astute rapid-fire takes of news on the Web are a good deal better than the columns that guys like Beam spend the whole day writing.

What the Web really means is independent content and faster turnaround time, which is a daunting prospect for those writers used to the old days of tremendous time to write a column. A highly skilled blogger can turn out an articulate 2,000 word report of an event in just under two hours. The hasty speed comes from bypassing the endless edits made when a posting is handed from copy editor to section editor to EIC to writer (if he has any say at all in the machine; for the most part, s/he does not) to EIC. And so on. And so on. Until the writer is, in the more gargantuan papers, fully drained of any passion for the piece and largely exhausted.

Meanwhile, the web writer jumps from stone to stone in this giddy lake, with his/her own feverish promptitude being the singular millstone.


posted by ed at 12:19 PM on April 2, 2002

Speaking of windbags fearing for their jobs, Dvorak just decided to deconstruct blogs.

Sigh.
posted by anildash at 12:29 PM on April 2, 2002

Thanks, Anil, for saying what I would have said.
A little late in the game for such a petty column, wouldn't you think?
posted by me3dia at 12:41 PM on April 2, 2002

I'm guessing that as a response to critics, it might be more effective to address their actual arguments than to presume that they're saying what they're saying because they're afraid of losing their jobs. I'm also guessing that a direct response to their points would be a more compelling argument than making fun of their supposedly miniscule endowments.
posted by anapestic at 12:45 PM on April 2, 2002

nstop: Combine that with a web stats package that can estimate average page view times -- noting page hit to page hit timestamps and calculating the lag as "view" time -- you can get pretty darn specific

do you know a free package that can do that?

anyway, my point is that papers have circulation figures that may in fact be comparable to the level of accuracy that unique IPs can give a website (how many people subscribe but don't read more than the sports page? how many people pick it up on the train? how many copies get thrown out at the end of the day from news stands?)
posted by rebeccablood at 12:49 PM on April 2, 2002

Pesty, you're right, of course. I tried to be a bit better about that in my response to Dvorak. And, of course, there's a lot of crap in the realm of weblogs, as in most things. But I don't really think either Beam's or Dvorak's article was written in a tone that could lead to meaningful dialogue.

And RCB, we've had the same discussion about the meaninglessness of circ figures here. The ugly part about the web was that writers for print were forced to face the reality that a reader was as likely to skip their story to read a futon ad as they were to page past the ad for their story. The web only made the ongoing denial of that reality impossible.
posted by anildash at 12:54 PM on April 2, 2002

anil: meaninglessness of circ figures here well, I gues it's interesting to me because banner ads are dying because people expect a level of provable interaction with an ad that isn't possible, and therefore not expected in the print world.

also, I get irritated with writers of any medium who insist that they have x-number of readers. it betrays an egotistical and fundamental non-understanding of circulation figures, web statistics, and human nature.

oh, and if we didn't feed the trolls by linking to them, maybe they would stop trolling us.
posted by rebeccablood at 1:02 PM on April 2, 2002

I keep a web log on my site. It is something I do just for myself. It does matter to me who reads it. I put things in I like. I don't post everyday. Sometimes not for months at a time. I have a few people that I know read it once in awhile, because I get a email every now and then thanking me for a link to something they had searched for and wind up at my log.

The whole blog thing seems to have exploded, there are just too many to read everyday.
posted by bjgeiger at 1:09 PM on April 2, 2002

oh, and if we didn't feed the trolls by linking to them, maybe they would stop trolling us.

Well, sure. I am still 12-stepping through that particular dependency, though, so I settled on including the link in this thread instead of starting a new one.

Besides, can we claim we're exposing it, the sunshine theory? The truth is, I'm just rebutting Dvorak's words so I can get his column. I want to write esoteric pieces about the latest Taiwanese DRAM scandal, too!

The whole blog thing seems to have exploded, there are just too many to read everyday.

I find the same problem with newspapers.
posted by anildash at 1:16 PM on April 2, 2002

I keep thinking that all these "clueless old-media `blogging phenomenon' stories" (as Lileks so aptly puts it) surely mean that the weblogging craze has peaked.
As has been noted, these pieces seem to turn up just about every week. If you've read one, you've read them all. But we read them and link to them anyway.
The only notable thing about this one is that Beam was shrewd enough to troll James Lileks. Once he sees how many hits he's getting, from generating the "buzz" produced by poking a stick at the hive of webloggers, he may be tempted to launch his own--what am I saying, he's above that sort of thing.
posted by StOne at 1:29 PM on April 2, 2002

A highly skilled blogger can turn out an articulate 2,000 word report of an event in just under two hours.

Where is this 'articulate reporting of an event' actually happening, ed? And you're also contradicting yourself, by applying the process of columnism to reportage, where there's nowhere near the 'endless edits'. Weblogs don't seem to 'report' much, but neither do columnists. Compare that with Robert Fisk's latest, which is good because it drops his usual soapboxing for some real, evocative reporting on the motley mob in Ramallah: "Peaceniks charged back into the foyer, screaming at reporters to stand in the road holding their passports above their heads." 700 words, turned around in a couple of hours. And I don't see Indynews, which does report events, being accepted into the weblog pantheon.
posted by riviera at 1:38 PM on April 2, 2002

I wish Kozmo hadn't gone out of business. I'd adore to have someone deliver Mr. Beam a bowl of milk and perhaps a scratching post too.
posted by Sapphireblue at 1:42 PM on April 2, 2002

stOne: I keep thinking that all these "clueless old-media `blogging phenomenon' stories" (as Lileks so aptly puts it) surely mean that the weblogging craze has peaked.

there have been a lot lately, for sure, but these stories have been appearing since 1999, slowly increasing with each passing year. each time a wave comes through, someone says exactly the same thing you just did.
posted by rebeccablood at 1:43 PM on April 2, 2002

Short article about blogs in the Des Moines Register
posted by ducktape at 1:58 PM on April 2, 2002

Short article about blogs in the Des Moines Register

"...some people use [their weblog] like a dating service..."

???????? WHAT? I mean, except for anil....
posted by rebeccablood at 2:07 PM on April 2, 2002

And I don't see Indynews, which does report events, being accepted into the weblog pantheon.

Indynews, or Indymedia or whatever it's called, isn't "accepted" because it's essentially a wiki (which isn't the same thing as a blog, problem one; most people see it as Bizarro Wire Service) to which anybody can post anything, and do so anonymously (problem two). This means its credibility is zero in most peoples' eyes. Which probably isn't totally fair, as there is some legitimate reportage buried under all the rant posts about Big Oil and whoevers' puppets got confiscated this week, and the obviously blatantly false articles are yanked eventually, but without some sort of serious editorial sorting by Indymedia staff (which of course would be "undemocratic" and thus won't happen), it'll never gain any serious credibility outside of the hard left community. That's just human nature.
posted by aaron at 2:16 PM on April 2, 2002

"...some people use [their weblog] like a dating service..."

Oh, I do this. On the other hand, after four years, I gotta say the service sucks.
posted by bradlands at 3:16 PM on April 2, 2002

I mean, except for anil....

and me. [and some other married weblogger couple whose name I can't quite remember...] Hang in there Brad!
posted by jessamyn at 4:20 PM on April 2, 2002

Where is this 'articulate reporting of an event' actually happening, ed?

This account of the guy sitting behind Richard Reid, the shoe bomber was one such instance of a weblog author scooping big media with a first person account. This account of a Michael Moore appearance gives an angle Moore's own description doesn't jibe with. And they're not merely first person accounts or simple transcripts of events, these are written with some thought and perspective on the events after they occurred.
posted by mathowie at 4:48 PM on April 2, 2002

Hang in there Brad!

Thanks. *sniff*
posted by bradlands at 4:49 PM on April 2, 2002

Riviera: To be fair, I meant to apply the term "web writer" to that statement. Even so, considering the blog, all one has to do is look at the posting times and do a quick word count to come up with that figure. :)

And as someone who once wrote a column edited by other hands for a brief period, let me assure you that the editing process is nowhere nearly as loose as you suggest it is.
posted by ed at 5:13 PM on April 2, 2002

Asking Dvorak to understand blogging would be like asking my grandpa to understand Devo. Not gonna happen.
posted by MegoSteve at 5:35 PM on April 2, 2002

"...some people use [their weblog] like a dating service..."

How do you think I got Britney? But that's just between you and me.
posted by owillis at 6:18 PM on April 2, 2002

blah, it's "being used as a dating service" when the weblogger is using it to actively solicit dates, not when it results in accidentally meeting someone else.
posted by rebeccablood at 6:35 PM on April 2, 2002

Does using a weblog as a dating service work? Because, you know, I could stand it.
posted by kindall at 8:14 PM on April 2, 2002

according to my observations it *might* work as a match-making device if you're amenable to a long-distance romance, but no way will it get you someone new to go out with every saturday. or even the same person every saturday, unless one of you is willing to move.
posted by rebeccablood at 8:41 PM on April 2, 2002

> unless one of you is willing to move.

Which does happen.
posted by sylloge at 8:50 PM on April 2, 2002

(And hang in there Brad!)
posted by sylloge at 8:52 PM on April 2, 2002

blah, it's "being used as a dating service" when the weblogger is using it to actively solicit dates

And that's me how?

Which does happen.

Sigh.
posted by anildash at 10:07 PM on April 2, 2002

>> unless one of you is willing to move.
>Which does happen.

Which has happened.
S'all I'm sayin'.

posted by Su at 10:39 PM on April 2, 2002

*giggles*
posted by bradlands at 12:11 AM on April 3, 2002

A few small points I made in my response to Beam's column (cc:ed to Lileks):

Beam seems to assume that bloggers have as inflated a sense of importance as he does. As others have mentioned, blogs tend to reflect a person's individual (or a group's collective) thoughts, opinions, and observations. They're largely personal -- not necessarily meant to be the be-all and end-all of writing.

That's just one reason why his column sucked.

If I don't like a weblog, I don't write a nasty column about it. I just stop reading it. (Of course, it's not my job to write nasty columns....)

Beam was shrewd enough to troll James Lileks.

True, he did specifically mention fellow print journalists Lileks and Sullivan... perhaps he was simply needling his "peers" and pissed off a lot of other people as a secondary consequence?

Speaking of which.... yeah, why are we (bloggers) so sensitive about articles like this? Maybe because columns like this boil down to disrespect.

I don't think anyone really likes being seriously ridiculed or belittled for self-expression (though, to some extent, it comes with the territory). Also, a lot of people spend a lot of time doing this, and we want to feel like we're not just [insert masturbatory euphemism here].

It also occurs to me that we're all very convinced of the vitality and importance of the web as a medium, of which blogs have become an increasing part. Therefore, to some extent, bashing blogs amounts to bashing the web, which pisses us off, apparently, to no end.
posted by gohlkus at 12:57 AM on April 3, 2002

why are we (bloggers) so sensitive about articles like this?

Because bloggers really do suffer from the inflated sense of importance you mention.

"Alex Beam is a twit. This Boston Globe columnist (whom I've never heard of) . . . "

The man's a terrific writer for a major American newspaper and every crank who puts their recipes, dating habits, personal grooming tips and faux indie movie reviews up on an Angelfire page feels he has no right to mention the Emperor has no clothes. If he's such a twit, ignore him and move on as you purport to do with bloggers (though I fail to see the equivalence).

As someone mentioned above, this is exactly what Beam does for a living. Look at his columns: I would say (as a regular reader) that better than half are designed to annoy some group. And he got you.
posted by yerfatma at 5:22 AM on April 3, 2002

It'll be fun to watch it climb to the top of the charts at Blogdex. Now I'm quoting myself.


Number 2 with a bullet.
posted by iconomy at 5:38 AM on April 3, 2002

Beam didn't just mention Lileks in the piece; he sent him that "web dreck" email in advance of writing it. So that's why I say Beam trolled him...but it prompted a great rejoinder from Lileks.

posted by StOne at 7:36 AM on April 3, 2002

That letter to Lileks was incredibly obnoxious. If your shtick is to troll in print and provoke strong reactions, fine. Doing it on a personal level and flaming people in e-mail, hoping you'll get a hostile response to use in a column, is pathetic.
posted by rcade at 8:17 AM on April 3, 2002

why are we (bloggers) so sensitive about articles like this?

-Cuz nobody likes it when kibitzers from RealityLand pee in the river MakeBelieve?
-Cuz it's hard to be captain of the pirate ship when your Dad keeps telling you to come down from the treehouse?
-Cuz bubbles hate pins?

Wear lifts, dress impeccably, smile and nod and mingle with the celebrities, as if you are one of them. Move in time to the collective rhythm, and if you can't hear the music, fake the dance anyway. Be graceful and aloof until it makes you sweat, and never, ever let them know you were once one of those squat, squirmy little inferiors who comically overreact to facile criticism by taking roundhouse swings at unbreakable, tweed-enshrined kneecaps.
posted by Opus Dark at 8:40 AM on April 3, 2002

Omphalomantics 'R Us.
posted by y2karl at 9:24 AM on April 3, 2002

Who gives a rip what the columnists write.

Blog till you drop, people, it's the Future-and no one can stop it...
posted by bunnyfire at 9:36 AM on April 3, 2002

This is a bit off-topic, but does anyone know what these web stats sites use for tracking? As you can see the format is almost identical, so I'm quite sure it's the same code, I just can't figure out where they got it.
posted by jaden at 10:34 AM on April 3, 2002

I'm read by 12 regular folks and 1 pirate.
Arrrr, jonmc, ye said ye wouldn't talk about me!
Lash him to the yardarm, Stavros!
posted by Kafkaesque at 8:54 AM PST on April 2

I was all ready to toss in a yaaar! or two as well, but I'll content myself with a few verses of 'ten men on a dead man's chest', me hearty!



Ah, what the hell...Yaaar!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:11 PM on April 3, 2002

I don't care to see another link to Virginia Postrel or Kausfiles, or Andrew Sullivan, Joanne Jacobs, etc. They're all traditional pundits with no particularly keen insight into three-fourths of the crap they talk about. It's just circle-jerk punditry. Who needs more of that in their lives? A show of hands? I'm with aaron on the whole a-list thing, which by the way seems overwhelmingly conservative-free market libertarian (kaus is going way right lately) and/or militaristic. Wow. What an alternative to mainstream political punditry! Reading these blogs increasingly makes me feel icky, so I've largely stopped.
posted by raysmj at 11:19 AM on April 4, 2002

Example of A-list political punditry blogs at their worst: Joanne Jacobs's current blog. A link to Reason, followed by Lileks, and then Postrel, Andrew Sullivan and Instapundit. Every single one a conservative/libertarian site. The she somehow compares Postrel's dynamism "theory" to a rather well-known Bob Dylan song. This is so see-through and hackneyed.

posted by raysmj at 11:57 AM on April 4, 2002

This is how bad the circle jerk has gotten: Glenn Reynolds has linked to Lileks for three straight days in a row now.
posted by aaron at 12:03 PM on April 4, 2002

I like Lileks, but that strikes me as just plain ridiculous. (Especially when his latest Bleat is a placeholder, for crying out loud.)
posted by darukaru at 12:23 PM on April 4, 2002