9.15.2004
In an article on comment-spam on blogs in the USC Annenberg On-line Journalism Review, Dave Winer (who the reporter describes as the "godfather of blogging") has some particularly striking views on comments on blogs:
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More recently, the godfather of blogging Dave Winer, former CEO of UserLand, told me that comments are not an intrinsic part of a Weblog and have basically failed after a brief honeymoon period in the early history of blogs. "I think a blog is a publication, and publications have proven that letters to the editor are useful," Winer said. "But blogs with comments are not letters to the editor. Letters to the editor are edited, they're selected, and that selection process is a very important aspect of it."
Instead, Winer thinks commenters should simply run their own blog if they want to comment. While he thinks that all the war tactics by bloggers will ultimately fail, he says that Google itself could solve the problem by adjusting PageRank so that it doesn't weight links from comments as heavily as links within blog posts or on other pages.
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Kos takes him to task for, among other things, failing to recognize the benefit of on-line communities. (In all fairness Winer himself has said that the reporter did not, understandably, quote everything he said and Winer will clarify this later.)
But on-line communities are only part of the story; there are some other interesting things buried in Winer's comments. The first is Winer's notion of blogs as "publications". This seems to me to be the wrong word to use when describing a blog. The word "publication" means fundamentally the act of making something public, a one-way information flow, thus de-emphasizing the conversational nature of most blogs. Indeed, the key word for blogs is "share," with an implied give and take of information (the concept behind Dan Gillmor's We the Media.) "Publication" is a much more static term (I would be interested in actually seeing how many people refer to their blogs as "publications," it is the first I have heard of it.)
The second problem I have with Winer's comments is something that I have long encountered in the blogosphere: the idea that everybody can participate equally. Perhaps Winer, who no doubt has enjoyed the fruits of heavy traffic to his "publication" for years, cannot relate to what the less visible among us actually experience when we blog. Our words tend to slip into an ether of random google searches and stay confined to a loyal readership among family and friends.
There is no problem with this, but for Winer to suggest that somehow starting your own blog to comment on other blogs is miraculously going to provide for anything but one-sided conversation (coming from the "A" listers) is disingenuous at worst, naive at best. Seth Finkelstein put it best when in an interview with me he said:
"It's a big big mistake thinking that gatekeepers are gone. The reason people say this, those people saying it are those who have overcome all the barriers except for the production barrier. They have the connections, the paying job, all the barriers except for the editoral publishing barrier are removed. When it shifts they think they have Christmas everyday. That barrier is replaced by a noise barrier. The barrier is exactly the same, one gatekeeper has become another. Shift in one place, but there is a corresponding loss in another space."
Seth is getting at an important point, namely that you cannot read everybody in the blog world. So it seems to me that Winer's solution would create a system where the trafficked blog would publish their statement, link to those who agree (if they so choose, but they would not have to,) ignore those that do not, and you get a simple community of like-minded folks reading the "A" lister and select others. At least with comments you have to, in theory at least, read what other people have said prior to you; it is democratic in the best sense that everyone can participate and be read. The underlying fact is that unless you are well-established at this point, you are not going to be that well read; breaking into the market is successively harder as more and more people come on-line.
Which is why perhaps, outside of a select few, the marquee bloggers are white men, probably somewhere between 35-40. Certainly at the DNC this was true. And events like BloggerCon tend to look like the white men who sit in Congress, or sit in the media booths. All of which tends to remind me of the myth in America that everyone can make it, everyone can participate, there is no need for affirmative action, etc... If all this is true, why is the on-line and off-line world still white like Casper. But do not look for discussions of "race" on the blogs; we are a color-blind blogosphere.
Ain't it funny how big bloggers become big media?
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More recently, the godfather of blogging Dave Winer, former CEO of UserLand, told me that comments are not an intrinsic part of a Weblog and have basically failed after a brief honeymoon period in the early history of blogs. "I think a blog is a publication, and publications have proven that letters to the editor are useful," Winer said. "But blogs with comments are not letters to the editor. Letters to the editor are edited, they're selected, and that selection process is a very important aspect of it."
Instead, Winer thinks commenters should simply run their own blog if they want to comment. While he thinks that all the war tactics by bloggers will ultimately fail, he says that Google itself could solve the problem by adjusting PageRank so that it doesn't weight links from comments as heavily as links within blog posts or on other pages.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kos takes him to task for, among other things, failing to recognize the benefit of on-line communities. (In all fairness Winer himself has said that the reporter did not, understandably, quote everything he said and Winer will clarify this later.)
But on-line communities are only part of the story; there are some other interesting things buried in Winer's comments. The first is Winer's notion of blogs as "publications". This seems to me to be the wrong word to use when describing a blog. The word "publication" means fundamentally the act of making something public, a one-way information flow, thus de-emphasizing the conversational nature of most blogs. Indeed, the key word for blogs is "share," with an implied give and take of information (the concept behind Dan Gillmor's We the Media.) "Publication" is a much more static term (I would be interested in actually seeing how many people refer to their blogs as "publications," it is the first I have heard of it.)
The second problem I have with Winer's comments is something that I have long encountered in the blogosphere: the idea that everybody can participate equally. Perhaps Winer, who no doubt has enjoyed the fruits of heavy traffic to his "publication" for years, cannot relate to what the less visible among us actually experience when we blog. Our words tend to slip into an ether of random google searches and stay confined to a loyal readership among family and friends.
There is no problem with this, but for Winer to suggest that somehow starting your own blog to comment on other blogs is miraculously going to provide for anything but one-sided conversation (coming from the "A" listers) is disingenuous at worst, naive at best. Seth Finkelstein put it best when in an interview with me he said:
"It's a big big mistake thinking that gatekeepers are gone. The reason people say this, those people saying it are those who have overcome all the barriers except for the production barrier. They have the connections, the paying job, all the barriers except for the editoral publishing barrier are removed. When it shifts they think they have Christmas everyday. That barrier is replaced by a noise barrier. The barrier is exactly the same, one gatekeeper has become another. Shift in one place, but there is a corresponding loss in another space."
Seth is getting at an important point, namely that you cannot read everybody in the blog world. So it seems to me that Winer's solution would create a system where the trafficked blog would publish their statement, link to those who agree (if they so choose, but they would not have to,) ignore those that do not, and you get a simple community of like-minded folks reading the "A" lister and select others. At least with comments you have to, in theory at least, read what other people have said prior to you; it is democratic in the best sense that everyone can participate and be read. The underlying fact is that unless you are well-established at this point, you are not going to be that well read; breaking into the market is successively harder as more and more people come on-line.
Which is why perhaps, outside of a select few, the marquee bloggers are white men, probably somewhere between 35-40. Certainly at the DNC this was true. And events like BloggerCon tend to look like the white men who sit in Congress, or sit in the media booths. All of which tends to remind me of the myth in America that everyone can make it, everyone can participate, there is no need for affirmative action, etc... If all this is true, why is the on-line and off-line world still white like Casper. But do not look for discussions of "race" on the blogs; we are a color-blind blogosphere.
Ain't it funny how big bloggers become big media?
|| dkreiss, 1:39 PM
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