WaPo Restores Comments....For the Moment...

Checking up on the Washington Post this a.m....I found that they acutally did restore comments to post.blog.

There is also a Q & A with Exec Editor Jim Brady (who is quite the babyfaced newspaperman....hmmm....how come such a young man...couldn'd find a competent, seasoned, older woman to do this job???)

The Q&A though is a fascinating bit of spin. I won't jump on the bandwagon that's excoriating the Post for its insufficient--yet rather quick--response (the Q&A took place at noon on friday and some comments were restored by 6pm-ish). Frankly, if the Post would just hire a few good blogging consultants--people who acutally blog for the personal edification, not as corporate shills--they might have been able to deal with the response adequately.

The best response *might* have been to do what newspaper-sponsored Forums and Newsgroups usually do: delete the seriously foul posts, get rid of any unrelated spam, and let everyone else hash the whole thing out amongst themselves. They can, if they want, dictate to the reporter or whomever started the sh*tstorm to not respond to the negativity. That would be their, or the sh*tstormee's, choice. Sometimes the best way to respond to sh*t is to not respond--it can be a no-win situation. But negative comments,even ones peppered with an obscenity or two, if making a coherent point and are not personal attacks, are a consequence of communication in our modern world.

Then again, there's always this attitude one could take: foul personal attacks more often than not reflect badly on the one making them, and don't necessarily reflect anything to the person being attacked. It's the old "I'm rubber, you're glue...whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you" mentality.

Dan Gillmor has a great comment about it.

Think about it.
Journalism citizen journalism, media Blogging Blog Blogs

"Hey! You Suck!"--Incivility Shuts Down Wash Post Blogs

The Washinton Post chose to close its comments indefinitely after several angry posts in response to ""a statement made by ombudsman Deborah Howell that Jack Abramoff, who is at the centre of a Washington scandal for having bribed a significant number of politicans in order to 'buy influence', payed off Democrats as well as Republicans after ."

Terry Heaton thinks this is a case of the deeper issue here is command and control from the mountain top.

But Terry misses the another salient point to the Post's actions: it may seem like a big deal, but in truth, it only highlights a general problem with incivility in the blogosphere. And that there is no clear consensus, even among bloggers, on how to handle it. Terry wants to pick on msm for its actions, but would he feel the same way about individual bloggers taking the same action?

As some of us will remember there was quite a bit of fallout after BlogHer over Ambra Nykola's poison-pen blogging about Koan Bremner's presence at the conference. Although Ambra is definitely entitled to her rabid remarks, she blocked dissenting bloggers from posting comments to her entry. Further, Ambra often shuts off commentary on posts at her blog (specifically, look up her post on Sex and the City where she did not want any dissenting viewpoints.)

Basically, she's top-down communicating to the rest of us in the blogosphere--but she doesn't seem to be suffering all that much for it.

Now, when I came into blogging, I was a veteran of the New York Times Film Forums--which, if one didn't watch out, one could end up pretty bruised and bloddy. The Film Forums ended up getting trolled so bad-- with some of the trolls launching personal email attacks against posters and hacking several posters' personal websites--that the usually low-profile Moderators chose to require registration and approval before allowing individuals to post to the Forums.

Knowing what can happen in the Wild Wild West of the 'Web, I expected, when I started blogging, to get flamed, fired on, and fumed at--and by anonymous people (because it's easier to do that when nobody knows who you are.) And, yes, it happens sometimes, but hey, I'm made of asbestos, so no biggie...

Still, there are loads and loads of bloggers who don't know how to handle it and are hurt/offended/horrified/pissed off when it happens. That's why we're having the Us and Them: A Blog Conversation Guide at SXSW Interactive in March.

When bloggers are concerned about incivility and confused about how to handle it, how can we expect msm (that is, for the most part, confused about blogging) to handle it any better?

Frankly, it's a much bigger issue than just the Post's "indefinite" response.

Journalism citizen journalism media Blogging Blog Blogs

When a Writer isn't a Blogger

Was Simon Dumenco--"The Media Guy" at AdAge--suffering from a case of sour grapes when he wrote A Blogger is Just A Writer With A Cooler Name? Did he, perhaps, lose out on a hot chick to the scruffy dude who said he was a blogger?? And I wonder how Simon would feel if we all stopped calling him a columnist and called him *just* a writer with a fat pretentious title and a regular salary.

Seriously, though-- Dumenco is one in a long line of "journalists" (who the heck knows where he went to school) who feel some sort of compulsion to tell the rest of us who bloggers are and what bloggers are about--that blogging is just about the software and the distinction between writers and bloggers is all an artificial construct. According to Dumenco:

OK, you might argue, blogging is aesthetically a different beast -- it's instantaneous media. (Well, since the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, pretty much all media has had to learn how to be instantaneous.) It's unpolished. (The best blogs I read are as sophisticated as anything old-school media publishes.) It's voice-y. (The best old-school media I read tends to be voice-y.) It's about opinion, not reporting. (The best reporting to come out of MacWorld in San Francisco last week was published on blogs.) It's, well, often sloppy and reckless (and Judy Miller wasn't?).

OK, then, you might further argue, the Internet itself treats blogs as structurally distinct things. Well, sure, there are blog-specific search engines (Technorati, Icerocket, blogsearch.google.com, etc.), but the lines between blog and non-blog content are rapidly dissolving. Traditional news organizations and blogs often get seemingly equal weight as news sources in Google News. And just last week, I found out about Sprint's West Coast fiber optic network outage from the new Gmail Web Clip ticker that sits atop my e-mail inbox -- and the clip came from a blog, not a traditional news organization.

More importantly, though, I wonder who it is--other than bloggers--that Dumenco considers writers. He paints a broad stroke with his title, but narrows the focus of the term in his text to journalists--very bad form! Guess he doesn't consider folks who scribble on legal pads, and sometimes call themselves writers, to be writers. Probably also doesn't consider all those folks who pen and publish fiction to be writers either. (he also has the audacity to talk about "the best bloggers"--oh, who might that be? Obviously, the A-list. That's only one kind of blogger, too.)

So, I feel it's something of my own duty, being both a bona fide blogger as well as a bona fide published writer, to delineate some of the differences between bloggers and writers that he appears to overlook in favor of some tired, journalistic blogger-hating rhetoric:

Writers deal with Editors. Bloggers deal with Comments. Okay, Simon, I'm sure you could say this is splitting hairs, but these are two different/ Edtiors, as you are probably aware, comment--but they comment in an effort to fix your stuff. Editors comment on your spelling and grammar and wordchoice and fix your tone so your piece fits right with their publication or makes sure you conform to APA or Chicago. People who leave comments for Bloggers don't give a darned, and many don't know, about APA or Chicago rules. Commenters are more concerned with conversing with the blogger (or sometimes other commenters)--with refuting or supporting what the blogger says. Bloggers can get defensive with Comments and still publish. Writers can't necessarily get defensive with Editors or their piece could get 86'ed and they labelled "difficult to work with."

Writing is static media. Blogging is social media When someone writes a story or an article, it is meant simply to convey information. The person isn't looking to get direct feedback. They might, but that really isn't the intention. Blogging isn't static. Once again, bloggers get direct feedback. They sometimes even change a post. A writer can write one article, get it published in a magazine, and that's it. A writer can sit around for another month or longer before another article comes out, can sweat over the process for months, and still have readers. A blogger not only has to eventually interact with others, but also has to keep writing on a regular basis or people forget you were ever there.

Writers write in paragraphs. Some Bloggers don't write in complete sentences. Writers don't aggregate. They fashion coherent thoughts into paragraphs. Lots of paragraphs. Some bloggers simply aggregate and their thoughts are pretty scatalogical. They want their blogs to be places where people can find links to stories about stuff. They want to be considered good providers of information--not quick-thinking, profound pundits. Writers want to be considered more than information providers--they want to have style and have a craft.

Writers can use more than 400 words per piece. Bloggers who do that risk not getting read. Writers can have lots of words--anywhere between 400 and 2500 or more depending on the piece. Some writers can't express themselves in less. Bloggers have to be quick or risk boring their readers. I risk boring readers. So does one of the smartest long-entry bloggers out there, Jay Rosen, who doesn't seem to mind the delineation between blogger and writer (but might prefer I call him journalist.)

Some Writers never, or can't blog. Some Bloggers don't, or can't write Some bloggers would never, ever think of writing articles. Some writers would never, ever think of blogging. It's a risk/reward thing. Some bloggers hate the idea of being edited. Some writers can't get past the editor in their heads long enough to blog.

Not all Writers are Media people. Not all Bloggers are Media people either. This harkens back to the old Dave Winer whine "all bloggers are journalists." Tell the girls and guys of MySpace.com or Livejournal that they're media people and some would probably freak. Just because someone is a journaller doesn't mean he or she is a journalist-- I don't think it needs an explanation, and it certainly isn't splitting hairs. Loads of journalists don't keep journals either. Then again, the idea of who a media person is all depends on the definition of media. If media is defined as a mode of artistic expression, mainly self-expression, then by golly! all bloggers and journalists and scribblers on legal pads are all the same! I'm sure there's a ton of journalists, and published writers, and published poets, and columnists who might have a very big bone to pick with that one...

So, unless Simon Dumenco is willing give up being called a columnist, occasionally not think in paragraphs, cut down on his wordiness, and take a direct comment or two, without censoring people who disagree with him, he may want to re-think how he uses the terms blogger and writer. Because as it stands now, he may know something about the latter, in the journalistic sense, but he really hasn't shown he knows all that much about the former.

>, media, Blogging, Blog, Blogs, Journalism, citizen journalism

Debunking the Claims of Craigslist: 5 Mortal Wounds Crippling Print Journalism

After reading the hype-rific article on Craig Newmark and Craigslist in New York Magazine , I got to thinking more and more about the claim that Newmark's list is, like David, singlehandedly bringing down the Goliath of print journalism.

Now, if my knowledge of late 20th century history and pop culture is as good as my bible knowledge (and believe me, both are formidable), Goliath wasn't particularly crippled by the slings and arrows of the Israelites before he faced David--or at least not the way print journalism has been devastatingly crippled by the slings and arrows of a fast-changing American cultural scene and downward spirialling economy.

Saying Craigslist is singlehandedly killing newspapers is more like saying a matador doesn't need picadores to win at a bullfight. But I can see where puddin'headded, pie-eyed journalists with gaps in their knowledge of late 20th century America could make those claims.

So, over the past couple of days, I've been able to synthesize five key shifts in the American economic (and cultural) landscape that are still impacting, and will probably overtake, American print journalism--and might even get Crag Newmark's p/r people and all those gushy journalists to think again:

1) Downsizing, Networking, and the rise of Temping: Downsizing of upper level clerical and middle manager jobs effected want-ad directly. No jobs, no need to post ads. Getting wise, people began to mine their business contacts more regularly for employment opportunities--something many working and lower middle class folks had never done. When big corps that had considerably downsized needed to fill vacancies, they turned to temp agencies--the costs paid to temp agencies offset paying additional h.r. folks to screen applicants and were far less than what a company would pay in benefits for an new employee. But people are optimistic, and temps could be strung along for very long lengths of time before they figured out the temp-to-perm job was ever going to go to perm. Big corps didn't need to run large ads for long lengths of time to bring people in for jobs because temps and temp agencies were more efficient and cost effective. When push came to shove, and coprs needed people, and after people protested and it became illegal not to post and interview for a job even if a corp was going to hire from networking, corps chose to run ads on Sundays only, when more people traditionally bought the paper. People looking for real jobs, quickly picking up on the trends of networking and temping and Sunday only ads, stopped purchasing papers during the week and waited only for that one day. Revenue dropped for daily paper sales and probably stayed the same for Sunday. Ad revenue certainly dropped.


2) Courtesy Cards issued by Grocery Stores: Mom and Dad used to subscribe to the local paper not just for keeping up on local happenings, but also because each and every local grocery chain ran coupons in its Sunday and Wednesday editions. Courtesy Cards, originally issued to help store patrons cash checks, became ways for stores to offer "clipless coupon" discounts in their stores (as well as keep track of customers' purchasing habits.) There was talk for a time of completely phasing out coupons, as in-store clipless coupons were just as effective as the printed issues. Even though there are still manufacturers' coupons, issued in glossy supplements, the advent of courtesy cards and clipless coupons made it so that consumers didn't need to buy papers on Sunday and Wednesday especially if they wanted to get in-store coupon deals. Some grocers will still run ads, but people don't need to purchase the papers--and a lot don't have the time to read the ads anyway. Clipless coupons also helped to make ads smaller. Smaller ads, smaller revenue. Clipless coupons eliminated the need for economically squeezed consumers to buy newspapers. No purchases, no revenue

3) Decentralized Newsrooms: In the late '80's and into the '90's, many small papers began to be bought up by the conglomerates--Knight-Ridder and Gannett among others. They consolidated facilities along the lines of the downsizing trend going on in the rest of corporate America. Printing became more mechanized, which further eliminated, or radically changed traditional jobs like typesetters. Newspapers got leaner because there was very little local reporting. Case in point: my old New Jersey local paper The Home News was bought and consolidtated with The Asbury Park Press. Local bureaus were dismantled--the net effect being that we in the New Brusnwick region began to know more about what was going on down in Neptune than we did about the five car pileup on Rt. 1 in Edison. There seemed to be no need to purchase local papers regularly, and some people stop subscribing to local papers....and especially after the Next Big Thing...

4)Free On-line Content: if the local paper was no longer local, and its content was now provided free, on-line, why bother purchasing a print version? As a New Brusnwick resident, I could log into the new on-line version of The Home News and Tribune and read only the paltry local stories. A resident didn't even need the paper to find out about theater listings, as they were also on line, and had a better chance of finding out about the local bar scene from various 'zines that started to appear, with more frequency, in music stores--as well as from the area "alternative press." So, unless one likes the tactile sensation of newsprint rubbing off on one's fingers, and the rustling sound of paper pages being turned, all the information one used to need from a local paper--job listings, movie times, and reports on local stuff--was now free. Why buy? Revenue decreases again.


Newspapers have crashed...the final thing that burns them out of existence might be:

5) There is no such thing as a NewspaperWoman: In my survey of the newpapering industry, there seem to be second, third, even fourth generation newspapermen. Ever heard of even a second-generation Newspaperwoman? Nope! Know of any of the paltry few first-generation NewspaperWomen who are mentoring a new generation if NewspaperWomen? Nope. They may be toiling away in obscurity, but they, and their protegees (if any), aren't necessarily getting loads of press. Further, men still seem to occupy the majority of editorial positions with both major and local papers. The few women that are in editorial positions rarely make it into the club that would classify them in the same sense as the newspapermen. When women have managed to infiltrate even the Fortune 500, even fewer, if any, have been able to claim the mantle of "NewspaperWoman" and, more importantly, to add their voices to that particular Good Old Boys' Club. The few women that are allowed to occasionally dine with The Big Boys never seem to express opinions about their profession that are respected and promoted by their peers. Print journalism is possibly the very last closed shop that's out there--and that closed-minded, closed-shop mentality has, I believe, hampered print journalism's ability to perceive, accept, and flex with the changes that have occurred in American culture and economy.

Across the landscape of history, women have been integral to the continued existence of, and have made significant contributions to, philosophy, science, religion and the arts. That women are still shut out of print journalism's club of Newspapermen is, in the 21st century, not just a disgrace, but might be the final fastening nail in print journalism's coffin. What is it they say about new blood invigorating things? Apparently the newspaper industry's missed out on that one in favor of the old saw "Stay the Course."

So, perhaps, Craig Newmark isn't doing anything to newspapers that newspapers haven't done already to themselves. When Goliath has self-inflicted mortal wounds, and is reeling from loss of blood, the pebble that dispatches him need only be the size of a grain of sand. And, unfortunatley, because of the short-term collective memory of many, and the excellence of a good p/r firm, that grain of sand ends up being perceived as a rock.

Think about it.

Journalism, citizen journalism, media

A Curious Little Gem In The Blogosphere

Yesterday, out of boredom, I was doing a Technorati search on media and stumbled across Scott Karp's blog Publishing 2.0.

Scott's the Managing Director of Research and Strategy for Atlantic Media and has alot on his mind. He started the blog back in December, and uses it to ruminate on the interface between New Media (blogging) and Old Media. Read his About page because I'm too lazy to parse it all out for ya.

Overall, he's really thinking about this whole thing--really thinking. Go take a look. I commented on Bloggers are So Wrong About Media because in it Scott seems to assume that all bloggers are created equal--and all of y'all know that some bloggers (mainly the A-list) are more equal than the rest of us around here. (and don't say we're not. don't piss on my shoe and tell me it's raining). Scott also discovered that being inflammatory and incendiary gets you somewhere in the blogosphere....

that's it exactly Scott...being the agent provocateur can get even a flea noticed!

But inflammatory rhetoric, like a tit-flash at Mardi Gras, will get a blogger only so far. There's got to be something beyond the snarky snap and the cranky jab. Hmmm...maybe that's why I'm so nice sometimes. ;-)

Give Scott a look....let's help the guy understand what The Rest of Us are doing out here.

media, Blogging Blog Blogs citizen journalism,

More on Snark and Journalism

Okay, so I did say I'd post the third installation of Jon Friedman's series on snark and journalism.

But, Jon...it's only the second full week of '06 and you're claiming that Gawker has it sown up for the year?!? for shame! There's a full 12 1/2 months left for the rest of the blogosphere to get more snarkarific. Who knows what might happen.

Then again, what do I know? ;-)

Still, I like that Jon quoted me in the second part, so here's the third:

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) - When it comes to the fine art of publishing snarky commentaries, nobody does it better than Gawker.

Gawker, the flagship of Gawker Media, stands apart because its editors, Jessica Coen and Jesse Oxfeld, are fair-minded and (very) funny. Oxfeld and Coen, who live in New York City, delight in skewering celebrities and newsmakers who do or say especially pompous things.

The four-year-old Internet site's wicked wit and journalistic sensibility are catching on. In November, Oxfeld noted, it had 6 million page views, its all-time high.

Unlike many pretenders to Gawker's throne, this site combines humor and basic journalistic values. Coen and Oxfeld are unabashedly sarcastic -- but seldom mean-spirited. "You take down people who deserve to be taken down," Coen said succinctly.

Their most loyal supporters keep them honest. "My mother doesn't read Gawker because it's too blue," Coen shrugged. "My mother emails me about my typos," Oxfeld said.

Oxfeld began writing for the site last June, Coen in August 2004. "I was the third permanent editor and have been here the longest," she said in an email, "which, I suppose, makes me the craziest." Coen and Oxfeld are carrying on the tradition established by such previous Gawker editors as Elizabeth Spiers and Choire Sicha.

Dynamic duo

I talked with Oxfeld and Coen on Jan. 3, over drinks in a West Village restaurant. During those two hours, it became apparent that Gawker's dynamic duo has a terrific working relationship.

They frequently finished one another's sentences, which is surprising since they work out of their apartments and can go days without even seeing one another (the two are advertisements for the virtues of instant messaging).

Oxfeld, who hails from northern New Jersey, has a background in mainstream journalism. Since graduating from Stanford University, he's had stints at Newsweek, ABC News, Brill's Content, Editor and Publisher as well as Media Bistro.

By contrast, Coen, a native of suburban Detroit who went to the University of Michigan, spent a year teaching 9th and 10th graders in South Central Los Angeles, through Teach For America. It's a national recruitment program which hopes to attract college graduates to teaching.

Then, after working in television for a year, she was accepted into the Columbia School of Journalism -- but turned down the opportunity to edit Gawker.

Actually, Coen might benefit more from a season at the Second City comedy training ground than hallowed Columbia. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Coen's gift for one-liners and deadpan humor someday catapults her to a gig on "The Daily Show."

Oxfeld said Gawker's publisher, Nick Denton (who declined to be interviewed for this piece), has said Gawker should have the breezy, informal feel of reflecting "what journalists talk about over drinks but can't write in their publications."

Because of the confrontational nature of what Gawker does, Denton has also said his staffers "have to be comfortable being outsiders."

Coen said the no-rules atmosphere is "a total blessing. We are free to say whatever we want, when we want."

And so they do. On Thursday, these snark-filled items appeared on Gawker's site:

-- "Macauley Culkin is preparing to marry actress Mila Kunis. We salute her bravery."

-- "Katie Couric's contract with the 'Today' show isn't up until May, and she can't even negotiate with CBS until then. So she'd appreciate it if you'd just shut the f*** up about what's next and focus on her legs."

-- "What's truly heartbreaking about Brad Pitt's forthcoming spawn, currently festering in Angelina Jolie's womb, is what the new baby will do to Jolie's two adopted children, Maddox and Zahara. Kids, say hi to your new, gorgeous replacement!"

Still, being needled in Gawker is a badge of honor. "The meanest thing we can do is ignore someone," Coen said.

The establishment is noticing. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said last year that she is a fan. Her colleague, Times media critic David Carr, devoted one of his columns to chide Gawker for writing insensitive stories during the recent media pandemonium surrounding Peter Braunstein, He's the one-time journalist who led police on a cross-country chase after he terrorized a woman on Halloween in New York. Carr cited "the permanently jaded sensibility of sites like Gawker."

A few days ago, when I told a senior Time magazine editor that I was going to write a column about the leader of snarky journalism, he shot back, "Well, you've got to write about Jessica Coen, right?"

And when I interviewed Justin Smith, the 36-year-old president of The Week magazine, he marveled, "It's amazing to think that Gawker is being written by two 25-year-olds!"

Coen, predictably, shrugged off the compliment. "We're NOT both 25-year-olds," she muttered. She grinned and added, "Jesse is 29!"

Sloppiness

Oxfeld and Coen have demanding jobs. Each of them writes 12 items a day.

The heavy workload can contribute to occasional sloppiness. Gawker commented on a Jan. 4 column in which I speculated about who's in and who's out in the media. I'd said that because of MSNBC's "serious improvement," Fox "could feel a pinch."

Gawker's unappealing interpretation: "Jon Friedman is clearly smoking crack, as proved by (among other things) his prediction that MSNBC will beat CNN and Fox News in 2006." (Among those "other things," I'd suggested that Gawker was "in" and the New York Post's gossippy "Page Six was "out.")

When I good-naturedly protested Gawker's account of what I'd written, Oxfeld dismissed me by saying I was "splitting hairs."

Success

For now, Gawker's biggest concern may just be coping with its new-found success.

In a surefire sign that they may be coming perilously close to mass acceptance, Oxfeld, Coen and some of their Gawker Media colleagues were featured in a photo layout in the February issue of Vanity Fair.

"We look so odd," Coen told me, "but at least I got guttered."

Will success ruin Gawker? "If we start taking any of it too seriously," Coen said, "we deserve to be bludgeoned to death with September Vogues."

Oxfeld noted: "We're working to keep it from being a problem by remaining just as tough on everyone as we've always been, including - as the site becomes bigger - ourselves."

The most common quibble I've heard about Gawker is that Coen and Oxfeld don't have bylines, so the readers don't know for sure who wrote what stuff. Perhaps it's fair to say that Oxfeld is the more earnest of the two while Coen lives to get under someone's skin.

When we concluded our interview that night in the restaurant, I thanked the two Gawker editors for their time. Oxfeld, devoid of snark this time, looked me in the eye and said evenly, "I trust you'll be nice to us."

But Coen smiled. "Oh, come on," she said devilishly, "something nasty wouldn't hurt. We haven't had a good catfight in a while."

In the Self-Important, Over-Memoired Literary World, There's a Sucker Born Every Minute

I've been following the ridiculously pathetic self-analyses of lit types taken in by fraud and the overall howlable revelations regarding the unmaksing of JT Leroy and James Frey as a couple of very crafty literary frauds.

Yours truly is certainly NOT surprised by these revelations. The voracious need of the literary world for salacious memoir has lead to a number of easily-forgetable and dopey screeds penned mostly by hip, young, upper-class misfits. The current-day crop of V-8 smack-to-the-head "oy! what were they thinking?" memoir started with Elizabeth Wurzel's Prozac Nation and Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, gathered steam with the likes of Lauren Winner's dopey Girl Meets God, and has slogging its way towards the literary gomorrahs of Frey and Leroy.

What is it about the lit world that needs these kinds of memoirs? Why not just put them out as the fictions they are?

Simple: memoir creates instant celebrity. It's an easier path than writing ficton. Plus, memoirs--esp. memoir about sexually confused, drug addled young outlaws that remind people of the Beat Generation--are easier to market than fiction.

The literati, and some readers, like to think these sordid tales can actually happen. Probably because many of their lives are deadly-dull and they need to know that there are, still, indeed, wild-at-hearts who can, like Burroughs and Keroac and Hemingway, become literary giants.

If Frey and "Leroy" were up-front about what they were doing, and said they were writing fiction, such as author Stephen Elliott, whose books Happy Baby and What It Means to Love You are riffs on (supposedly) personal experiences, and Dorothy Allison, who penned the remarkable Bastard out of Carolina under the same circumstances, would they be less than Celebrety? Probably.

Would they be on Oprah or have hugely lucrative film deals? Probaby not. They'd probably be (heaven forbid!) teaching somewhere, or surviving on grants.

More importantly, would they even have got published in the first place? Probably not. Or, if they did, it would be with a small press like McSweeny's rather than the formidable publishers of Frey & Leroy. There would be no agents, no big-time press junkets, no hob-nobbing with Hollywood.

The problem is with how fiction is chosen for publication. Ficton writing, in general, is more competitive these days--partly because of the massive number of MFAs being produced by just about every medium to small college out there. Everybody wants to be a writer. Not everybody can be a writer. What then appears to make a writer these days is not necessarily talent but the right MFA, the right connections, and the right agent.

Don't bother sending your manuscript to a publishing house--you'll only end up in a slush pile the size of an Indiana Jones warehouse.

It's easier to say that what one is writing is a life story. It doesn't require an MFA--just connections, as Frey and Leroy's stories show. And if the memoir is super salacious or pathetic, bam! immediate celebrity.

Celebreity is far more fun than spending time grading the short fictions of eager and possibly more talented freshmen, and waiting and waiting to have something published by a name-brand publishing house rather than a small literary press.

Beyond that, though, what is affecting the publication of so many dorky kid memoirs is the hyper-fascination with young people. Memoir--and I mean real, interesting, thought-provoking life story memoir--can only be penned by people who have had lives. And I don't necessarily mean people like Bob Dylan and John Updike who've lead extaordinary celebrety lives. I mean people who are not in their 20's or even early 30's. People like Frank McCort, who didn't start out as a celebrety nor did he expect a Pulitzer Prize for Angela's Ashes, and Terry Ryan's fascinating Mother in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio : How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less .

You can't do that kind of stuff (like win Pulitzers), nor write about those kinds of lives, until you've lived beyond the 18-34 age bracket--the tender beginning of adulthood. Being mentally disturbed, drug addicted, a born-again virgin, upper-middle-class, over-educated and spoiled doesn't automatically make one a great writer nor make one's life all that much of a compelling read.

It's just easier to polish a kid up and make him/her a celebrety than it does to take one of the old folks and make him/her photogenic again.

ah, the vanity of celebrity! ah, the gullibility of the literati!

So, all I can do is sit back and have a Nelson-styled "HA-HA!" at the lit world. They surely, and rightfully, got spanked this week.


media
Commentary Entertainment books

Godfather of Snark, Meet Little Sister of Nice....

I got into a great email exchange with Jon Friedman of MarketWatch yesterday, which resulted in me being part of the second part of his series on snark: Part 2: Andersen is snark's Godfather
Commentary: Spy magazine's visionary set the bar high

Once again I'm reprinting the piece in full from MarketWatch because it's a damned good look at the phenomenon of snark. Check out the site for the Question of the Day. Part 3 will appear on Friday

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Kurt Andersen is the reluctant Godfather of Snark.

Not long after we'd sat down to talk about the State of Snark, he frowned slightly at my observation and muttered, "I know I'm going to come off sounding like an old fogy."

Gimme a break. Every writer should have such worries. (And every old fogy should have Andersen's resume!) He writes the Imperial City column for New York magazine and was its editor in the mid-1990s. He founded the late, lamented Inside.com (whose only sin was being ahead of its time). He authored the best-selling and acclaimed "Turn of the Century." He has a radio show. And he hosted an interview program with media hotshots on the Trio cable channel. He's the media business's Mr. Multimedia.

Oh yeah, two decades ago he co-founded Spy -- the much-loved magazine that raised snark to a whole other level -- with Graydon Carter, who's now the editor of Vanity Fair.

Spy tweaked the political, media and business establishments in the spirit of the magazine's wry British predecessor. That Spy also managed to jump-start the media's snark movement is one of life's happy accidents. Although the magazine is long defunct, its influence can be measured anywhere that you can read smart, funny, finger-pointing humor.

In America, Spy followed the examples of National Lampoon and Mad magazines by offering uncompromising humor that delighted in taking shots at the pompous.

Spy, of course, came along more than a decade before the Internet took hold. Words like "blog" hadn't been invented, and "snark" hadn't seeped into the daily vernacular.

As for Andersen, today he regards his legacy uneasily.

"When I talk to college students about Spy, it's like I'm describing something that happened in the 19th century," Andersen, 51, mused over breakfast in lower Manhattan last week.

"We were very lucky," he said. "We started Spy at a time when our generation had arrived at full adulthood and wanted to connect to its anti-establishment youth."

Andersen and Carter wanted to present a magazine that re-created the atmosphere of smart, edgy people "talking over drinks" about "stuff that wasn't being reported" in the media at the time.

Later this year, Miramax Books will be publishing a best-of-Spy volume titled, naturally, "Spy: The Funny Years."

Andersen, a native of Omaha, has high praise for Jon Stewart, humor writer Dave Barry, David Owen of the New Yorker, and David Carr and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times.

If Andersen is indeed the Godfather of Snark, then, he said, "Maureen is the Godmother."

Taking the easy way out

Andersen, rightfully, frets that many young journalists today take the easy way out when they try to be funny and hip, he said. He cautions writers to avoid the trap of declaring, "I'm 26, and I look at everything, good or bad, snarkily."

Or as Leslie Savan, author of "Slam Dunks and No-Brainers," put it, journalism has shifted "from dogged reporting to catty retorting."

It's a valid point. Plenty of Web writers, in particular, seem to think that entertainment passes for good journalism, that meanness alone has value. When rock bands run out of ideas, they raise the volume on their music for effect. When bloggers run out of ideas or are too lazy or uninformed to offer analysis, they simply resort to raising the snark level.

It's second-rate writing -- but what the hey? It enables bloggers to delude themselves into feeling important or, at least, self-important. And that's what matters.

The Web logs even get a kick out of eating their own. No one, even another blogger, is safe from mindless criticism. "Believe it or not," blogger Tish Grier wrote to me from Chicopee, Mass., "I recently got challenged on the title of my blog because I'm not all snark all the time. There are a number of bloggers who can't get with the idea of irony and metaphor." (bloggers note: yes, y'all know what I'm talking about here: the comments on my being "nice." nope, don't think so. smart maybe, but not necessarily nice. besides, why be snarky all the time? that's like playing one note on a piano over and over. pretty soon you get sick of it. snarking should be done judiciously and with necessity.)

For his part, Andersen likes to read "sly, wry and bemused journalism, as opposed to debasement."

It seems that a lot of bloggers, in their desperation to demonstrate that they're funny, are chiefly interested in showcasing their work as a way to get a job writing for "Weekend Update" or "The Colbert Report." They're not trying to land at the New York Times or Newsweek.

Andersen is also curious why so many bloggers seem to get their jollies by gratuitously blasting their subjects, he said. When it comes to "humanity," he said, bloggers "have to draw a line in the sand. The trick is to try to tell the truth."

Thanks for the mention Jon!

The only thing Craigslist will get you in Chicopee, Mass is a hook-up. If your lucky. And if you're willing to drive to Hartford.

So why is The New Yorker so willing to jump on the bandwagon like so many other bloated metropolitan publications and claim that Craigslist is killing newspapers when the rest of us who don't happen to live near a major metropolitan hub can't find diddly-squat on his service (other than sex, and if you happen to be a middle-aged male looking for a girl or guy. yes, lots of gay hookups on Craigslist.)

Keep your pants on folks. In some parts of this country, the only thing that works, still, are the local papers. And when I say local...I mean local...they're even talking about resurrecting the Farm Report because we have farms!...and don't think for a minute that you can find a sports report that covers anything other than AHL hockey and high school football...check out
MassLive.com and Gazettenet to see what I mean.

We're not lacking for local anything out here. What we're lacking is a touch of Metro.

citizen journalism, media,

Murdoch and MySpace--Imperfect Together

The Guardian's Business section reported today on Rupert Murdoch's evil-media-mogul plans for MySpace.com...

News Corporation will start offering video downloads on its recently acquired myspace.com as it focuses on creating "more content and better content," said the chief executive, Rupert Murdoch.
Speaking at a technology and media conference in Arizona, Mr Murdoch described the potential for News Corp's online businesses as "enormous", predicting revenues of $350-$400m by 2007.

"There will be millions of downloads a day probably," he told an audience at Citicorp's annual Entertainment, Media & Telecommunications Conference in Phoenix without offering further details.

Curiously,

this piece by Nicholas Wapshott appeared in The Independent yesterday, explaining how much Murdoch and company don't know about MySpace.com:

Angry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites.

The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (£355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens

I'm sorry, but Murdoch's out to ruin a very good thing. If we couldn't already figure it out, Murdoch's all about "content" and predominantly about old business models and controlling the world of media. He has absolutely no concept of MySpace.com, its users, how its usesrs use it, and what it does. Murdoch's all about running things...and with MySpace, it will more than likely be about ruining things. Overmanagement of a site where the content is primarily user-generated will eventually discourage user-participation: and that could especially happen with something like MySpace which, up until the takeover and some bad press, thrived on a free-wheeling "do whatcha want" ethos.

Further, Murdoch doesn't seem to get the ethos of Web 2.0 either, which isn't about content as much as it is about conversation and peer-to-peer communication. What Murdoch seems to be proposing is a place where there will be much consuming (read:downloading) and not much participation. I'm sure the dowloading will have more to do with Murdoch Product than with anything produced by the members of MySpace....thus turning MySpace into nothing more than another content-driven media site.

As if we don't have enough of those already.

Murdoch's also throwing a young gun with lots o'cash at the web:

Mr Murdoch, 74, last week appointed 33-year-old Jeremy Philips to run News Corp's internet strategy and armed him with a $1bn fund to buy more sites. (from the Independent)

It's all about strategy...all about top-down communicating...all about consuming...

Which is not what MySpace was supposed to be about.

But this Web thing is pretty vast, and there are oodles and oodles of smart-alecks out there who could conceivably stay one step ahead of Murdoch's Minions (or is that millions?)

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

Snark is All The Rage!

I always crack up when someone uses the term "all the rage," because, from what I'm seeing, the "rage" is merely a bunch of hype to get folks to think everybody is doing a particular thing. Yo! It's a freakin' buzzphrase, people!! and it's usually perpetuated by some dope who wants you to buy his amazing new product
Now, given that small factoid, here's a complete re-print of Jon Friedman's 'Snarky' journalism is all the rage now
Commentary: Accent is on commentaries, not reporting from MarketWatch (and via Mediabistro)

I've re-printed the entire piece because permalinks to stories at MarketWatch notoriously go off-line quickly and are hard to find again. Friedman does give a wonderful synopsis of snarkiness and blogs, as well as the origins of snark (see Mark Twain.)

NEW YORK -- Thanks largely to the advent of the Internet blogs, "snarky" commentaries are sweeping the craft of journalism.
Partly because the snark movement is still so new, it's tough to pin down a definition for the species. But how's this one? If something is funny, edgy, topical and opinionated -- without resorting merely to being caustic or sophomoric -- it could probably be called snarky.

"A snarky attitude can be found everywhere now, except in the New York Review of Books," quipped Kurt Andersen, New York magazine's media critic. Spy magazine, founded by Andersen and Graydon Carter, now the editor of Vanity Fair, put a face on snarky humor in the 1980s.

Crucially, TV, print and even those hipper-than-thou Web journalists are anything but pioneers. It could be contended that other pop-culture chroniclers - filmmakers, stand-up comics and late-night talk show hosts, for instance - have been snarky for decades. It has taken a while for many journalists to catch up.

Once, way, way back during the 20th century, journalism was measured by such quaint qualities as dogged reporting and meticulous fact-checking.

But the rise of the blogs has changed plenty about the craft. Blogs have caught on because they serve the public's desire for immediacy, opinion and entertainment.

The blogs seem to want desperately to be hailed as the anti-MSM -- that is, the non-mainstream media.

Bloggers have been prominent players for only a few years - with the turning point coming in 2004 when they exposed the inaccuracies of CBS' report on President Bush's National Guard record. But they feel slighted because the establishment media have shortchanged their contributions to journalism.

Snarkiness can be loosely defined as demonstrations of criticism, particularly when the target is the establishment, either in the government, the military, corporate America or the dreaded media.

Origins

When did it all begin? Who was the first purveyor of snark? Of course, it wasn't only journalists who put their stamp on it. Perhaps it all began with Mark Twain.

The Depression-era Marx Brothers' movies certainly contained their fair share of it, as "Duck Soup" skewered politicians and "Horsefeathers" lambasted higher education. Charlie Chaplin, likewise, mocked the establishment.

Andersen suggested: (Long-ago New Yorker Editor) "Harold Ross was the Godfather of Snark."

Snarkiness gained strength with the work of Harold Hayes and George Lois at Esquire in the 1960s.

Television shows had a high profile. Johnny Carson (and Jack Paar, before him, to a degree) made much of his reputation based on his ability to poke fun at politicians of all stripes.

In the modern age, I conjecture, true snarkiness has its origins started with the political humor of the likes of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. David Frost, the British satirist and television-interviewer-to-the-stars, and the humor of the early 1960s show, "That Was the Week That Was" (aka "TW3"), were forerunners to the "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour."

Television snark reached its apex on October 11, 1975 at the introduction of Chevy Chase's sarcastic treatment of the news during the "Weekend Update" segment of "Saturday Night Live." The show has managed to keep up the tradition wonderfully over the years. These days, the cleverness of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler of "SNL" shine through.

David Letterman's late-night show on NBC, beginning in the early 1980s, threw a light on snarkiness, too. Letterman combined a certain irreverence with his quirky style.

Through the years, many people (in and out of journalism) have set a standard for snarkiness. In no particular order and in varying degrees of effectiveness, the list includes:

Jon Stewart, Maureen Dowd, Mad magazine, the Onion, National Lampoon, Spy, Andy Borowitz, the style and songs of John Lennon and Bob Dylan, "Curb Your Enthusiasm," the Washington Post's Style section, Art Buchwald, Gawker, Don Imus, (for better or worse) Howard Stern, the Wonkette, Dana Milbank, Christopher Buckley, Page Six, Dave Barry, Jim Bouton's landmark book "Ball Four," Dana Carvey's impersonations of President George W. Bush on " Saturday Night Live," the "Naked Gun" movies, P.J. O'Rourke, James Wolcott, Woody Allen and "Catch-22."

Snarky journalism, especially when it's witty and not merely mean-spirited, has an important place in journalism. But it also poses a danger.

It's possible, if the movement continues to build more forcefully, that a generation of young journalists will take their cues and allow commentating to replace reporting.
Let's hope it doesn't come to that, though.

He Enjoys Being a Girl....

Apparently, David Lat--the legal eagle slated to take over Wonkette has been penning something called Underneath Their Robes in the guise of a female (see the very *bad*--as in amateurish--illustration on the blog)....pretty pathetic actually. Why did he have to pretend to be a woman? Would his ravings be considered less "snarky" and less "fun" had he blogged pseudonymously as a man?

but hasn't Lat figured out that most of us know you don't have to be female to be a bitch.....

Yet I wonder still: will the folks who control Wonkette expect him to keep blogging under his pseudonymn now that he's been outed? With any vestage of transparency shot, it would be pretty silly for them to expect he become the New Wonkette, or stay the Old Article III Groupie.

But would good taste allow a blog titled Wonker and all that it implicates? I don't know, but if the bitch is willing to drop the fan dance, whip it out and let us see what he's really got.... ;-)

Blogging, Blog, Blogs media

Blogs As Literary Devices

Now that I'm finally over my flu/tonsillitis/whatever illness, I got to peruse MSM this a.m. and discovered Janet Maslin's delightfully tepid review of Ana Marie Wonkette Cox's new novel "Dog Days.

Um, can I stop yawning now??? Aren't Cox's 15-plus minutes of fame just about up by now? Who really cares about Wonkette writing a blog-hating roman a clef about blogging???

I think Maslin might be better off checking out some blooks to see what's happening among people who have more of a love than hate relationship with this new medium and see the potential of blog entries turning into books.

And maybe Wonkette shouldn't give up her day job just yet...

Blogging, Blog, Blogs

A terrible case of tonsillitis has shut my brain down...

in the meantime, check out Those Bastards!--the meanest blog in the blogosphere. (actually, it's alot of fu n)

Yes, the Broads are Gonna Bust Up Your Good Thing

A new report issued by the Pew Internet & American Life Project notes that women's use of the Internet is on the rise

So, the stats that came out at the end of last year--that made it a point to note the majority of blog readers (and Internet users) were white males between 18-34 with incomes in the 90k bracket--may be challenged by these new findings...

Women are more likely to see the vast array of online information as a “glut” and to penetrate deeper into areas where they have the greatest interest, including health and religion. Women tend to treat information gathering online as a more textured and interactive process – one that includes gathering and exchanging information through support groups and personal email exchanges.

Steve Yelvington, who must've read the PDF, notes that the report also states "...women are highly sensitive to "worrisome behavior in chat rooms"...

perhaps this has something to do with why women are, to some degree, more concerned than some men with how we conduct ourselves in the blogosphere. While some women could stand to "toughen up" a bit when it comes to interacting in this place, some of the men, who know how to debate but don't act like the emotinoally stunted and issue-laden Bill O'Reilly, could contribute to the dialogue.

After all, y'all don't want Big Momma smackin' you over the head when you don't make nice, now do ya?


Blogging, Blog, Blogs,Current events Cultural Issues civility onlinecommunity SXSW usthem

Chronic!

Better that Briney Spears and Kevin Whatterline pretending their marriage is so chronic comes this bit of Chronic from SNL...

talk about Nerds on the Loose...! Laughed so hard I almost died...

via Lost Remote

I've had this little blog on auto-pilot while I work on a piece on civility and gender...

BTW, I've been corresponding with Ben Metcalfe.

In the whole discussion (or is it argument?) of Us vs. Them, I wonder if my communication with Ben will turn me into a Them...vs. being Us.

Then again, it kind of depends on who defines "us" and who defines "them"...anyway...he's a pretty civil kind of guy, with a great understanding of the concept.

More on the whole civility thing soon...


Blogging, Blog, Blogs,<civility usthem

a few thoughts about anonymity

A couple of anonymous-blogger friends emailed me recently, concerned about statements I'd made about anonymous blogging...

so, here is what I *really* think of anonymous blogging: alot of people have reasons for anonymous blogging. Usually very good ones. Their anonymity, however, does not stop them from having honest, truthful, clear voices on their blogs. They still comment on others blogs, take comments on their own, and participate in this whole communal thing. Their anonymity does not prevent them from being civil. And they contribute alot to the blogosphere.

We have the right to be anonymous. And most people who blog anonymously support the positive and necessary aspects of anonymous blogging.

However, there are people who like to hide behind anonymity....They like to bully others-- and I don't mean the kinds of bullies who provide counter-point to high-profile public or political figures who can definitely take care of themselves. The anonymous ones that trouble me are those who seem to exist solelly to bully their peers--who like to say that they are protecting themselves by being anonymous, when all they are really doing is hiding so that they can be as nasty as they wanna be. They aren't protecting anything at all--and their incivility can end up hurting all of us.

I'm sure some of y'all are thinking "that's preposterous! how can negative, incivil bullying hurt an entire community! just ignore it!"

Why ignore something that can be used as leverage against the whole? Consider the Forbes Magazine article that was published in November, 2005. Examples like those in the Forbes article have damaged reputations of people as well as products. The bloggers are protected by free speech laws, even though they have significantly hurt others--and hurting others was their main intention.

So, how can negative bloggers who attack business end up hurting the wider blogging community? Because when the focus in MSM (still the main portal of information for the general populace) is on how bully-bloggers use anonyminty, the general public (and even some bloggers) begin to believe that negativity is all of what blogging is about. If people see blogging as negative, they will not participate in what could turn out to not only be a vibrant new Town Square but also an incredible forum for bringing people of like minds together in ways old media never allowed.

It all seems to be a form of self-hatred on the part of anonymous bullies. What is it then about people who appear to hate blogging but feel the need to use blogs as forums for their hatred and incivility--and who foster communities that thrive on incivility and negativity? They can say that they are exercising their right to free speech, and are helping others to exercise their need to free speech without exposing themselves, but it seems that they are manipulating the ideal of free speech and of anonymity to further something that has more to do with feeding the ego than with defending either ideal.

What to do about this? Who knows. Censorship? Doesn't work. Ends up making the concerned parties look like Nazis. Ignore the negative ones? Not really--ignoring a bully feeds the bully's ego. And the bully will only move on to others until it wins some pyrric ego victory.

So, perhaps the solution is to support anonymous bloggers whose blogging furthers the understanding of this as social media and who truly support our right to use the medium to share information and ideas as well as foster conversation and community.

Just a thought.

Hypocricy in Action

If y'all are interested in reading some annoying (and less than cogent) comments and conversations about civility on a blog, go over to the most hypocrical Alas, a blog here.

Amp doesn't quite get that he's got something that's more like a newsgroup going over there, not a blog. There are few bloggers and some who post actually don't like blogs or bloggers. Ironic, eh? His own comments about wanting to make his space more "feminist friendly" are nothing more than a condescending display of large cojones.

The blog has a distinctly negative and incivil community--and the feel of it is that the blogger in charge has wanted it to develop just that way. By not interacting with posters and letting the incivility get to critical mass, shows an abdication of responsibility on the part of Amp, who, as a blogger, is supposed to be like a good barkeeper and make sure that kind of thing doesn't happen.

With the way the comments unfold there, with the majority of contributors anonymously and furiously posting with a high degree of incivility, perhaps calling it "Alas, a Newsgroup" might be more accurate.

Grace Davis, one of my SXSW Interactive panel cohorts, tackles blog civility and the gender divide.

Blogging, Blog, Blogs SXSW

I have drafted and re-drafted a post on the civility thing--and realise I need to get out of the house for a bit before my words will gel properly..

in the meantime check out the following posts by Sean Coon on a
Noam Chomsky podcast and Sean's thoughts on social tagging.


linklove Blogging

Was the Mena and Ben's "Backchannel Incident" Really a Coverup for Secret U.S. Torture Practices in Europe?

Better Bad News went to some effort to put together this whacky little piece.

Was it all a "buzztrap"?

What the heck is a "buzztrap" anyway?

If anything, this piece takes a good swing at blog conferences. In a nice, constructive way. Kind of like the backchannel....

The Value of Irony in a Scrupulous World

Idyllopus left a comment this a.m.:

I am interested in why you call this particular blog "snarkaholic" when there's so little snark involved. You don't snark. I've read you for months and you seem pretty up front and dedicatedly interested in social networking in a non-elitist way.

(the rest of the comment is
here)

I had to think about this because Idyll is pretty much spot on--I really am into social networking, breaking down old barriers, being non-elitist and getting those outside the Long Tail to understand peer-to-peer communication.

So I thought about what, really, motivated me to call this blog Snarkaholic...And discovered that Snarkaholic expresses my love of irony--esp. as it exists in the Shameless Art of Self-Promotion embodied in hyperbole.

Just think about the last time you wrote a resume, about standard resume advice, and about how, in order to simply get someone to read your resume you just might have to use some rather bloated language. I figured Snarkaholic might be something like a bit of resume-style hyperbole.

And think about how ironic it is to have to engage hyperbole in order to get a job--that we can't just be ourselves, but must be some sort of meta-self on two sheets of paper in order for someone to deign to read about us.

The other side of Snarkaholic, though, is that by claiming it I reserve the right to snark at the A-listers or Bloggerati or Blogebreties or anyone else who annoys me when the occasion warrants a snark-- I've always wanted to be able to call a spade a freakin' two bit shovel if and when I see it and decide I want to do just that thing.

Because, for women especially, it's usually awfully impolite to challenge anyone who's higher up on the food chain than yourself.

Think about it. How often are women raised and corrected into politeness in one way or another--told to have good manners and to be respectful and be exactly who they a re told to be. We are told we shouldn't say anything bad about someone who has more experience than us in a certain field because if we knew what they knew we'd probably tow the same line. Think about how, when women start out being polite, and we say something a bit snarky, people are "shocked, shocked I tell you!" because we've ceased being Good Girls maintaining the status quo and our position in society. (I will amend this slightly by saying that I'm not sure how much gender matters with this issue in the blogosphere--I know there are a few men who feel the same pressure to capitulate.)

My sense was (and is) that if I started out being nice, I would have been stuck with a mamby-pamby facade that would have set up an expectation of all nice all the time.
With Snarkaholic I have the inalienable right to snark at whomever I choose, when I choose to do it and with good reason to do it-- which isn't all the time because I know how to use Good Judgment.

Most of the time I prefer to be my smart, witty, social, and diplomatic self. I like the role of mediator and of catalyst. If I were to be polite, without irony, I believe I would not be able to be either mediator nor catalyst in this ego-driven little medium.

My sense of irony extends to my picture as well. I recently asked a local business guy to look over the blogs. He told me that my pic was "a bit off-putting." I know he meant well--that if I had a nice stock photo of me smiling and confident that people would probably trust me more, esp as a consultant...or at least they'd think I wasn't such a hard-ass.

Because I'm really not a hard-ass. I can be firm in my opinions, esp. when I know my stuff, but I'm not some egotistical hard-ass who will rip your head off just because you disagreed with me. The businessman found me very approachable and highly knowledgeable-- not like Robert Conrad daring someone to knock the battery off my shoulder--and thought it might work better for me if I let people visually know this.

I figured they could just read the blog and determine it for themselves. Then again, maybe that's asking a bit too much in a sound-byte, short-attention-span society.

Yet all this leads me to think how the sense of irony in general is kind of lost in a internet-based world where we talk about the need for transparency on the part of business and journalistic entities, yet still defend anonymous snarking by the proletariat.

At least when I *do* snark at the business or journalistic entities, they all know who I am. I have a name, and a face. They are free to comment, to email me, to make friends with me, to establish peer to peer communication with me if they get that I'm smart enough to engage them, even if I'm not at their level just yet.

So far it's kind of worked. I've had a few A-listers read me, some of them even leave comments. I've also made a number of friends who are also amazingly smart and talented and haven't got the big-time recognition yet either. So even though I'm not "all snark, all the time" I don't think there's a need nor a reason to be--but sometimes staking the ironic and hyperbolic claim is what one must do in order to get read. Just a fact of life.

If you think that cat herding just might be your next dream job, I urge you to check out this video. It may change your life.

thanks Barb!

230!

Yesterday, this little blog it a milestone: 230 readers.

Thank you Phillipp Lenssen!

Battle of the Splog: Aggregating vs. Conversating

In two great posts, Steve Rubel takes on the issues of blog content theft and a splog in general. Steve is, rightfully, a bit peeved over bot-powered aggregating blogs that totoally crib someone's content thus making it look like the content is their own. (but if they are providing a link to the original, is it a problem? read J. Pepper's comments on Rubel's splog post for an interesting perspective.)

But Steve misses a the opportunity to raise a distinction between splogs and blogs when he says :

Content “theft” or whatever you want a call it has been an issue long before the Internet became a mass medium. It mushroomed over the past 10 years and now that everyone is a publisher, it will only get worse

The aggregator problem will only get worse if the emphasis on blogging remains on providing content and on telling people that they can make big bucks by providing subjectively judged "kick-ass content". If the emphasis continues to shift towards conversation, the importance of "kick-ass content" that does nothing will be a lesser issue. Creating conversation and community requires that bloggers become more involved in their blogging--and consider themselves contributors rather than simply spewers or sponges for content. If this happens, there will be little reason for the existence of sites that are only aggregators and never interact.

Besides, aggregators in general are IMHO boring and cheap. It's real easy to provide a link and a couple of pithy words.

Rubel also brings up the problem of RSS. RSS is great for finding out who's saying what, but it doesn't get individuals involved any further. This simple factor has lead to enterprising individuals designing bots that steal content without contributing anything--which is what happened to him. The solution might be to limit one's RSS feed to just a few lines. Sure, folks might not subscribe to your feed, but, then again, what's the purpose of what you do? Is your purpose to get people to only read your content, or is it something more social??

If conversation can start with good content, the problem with splog also becomes a problem for search engines who want to help people find original content and subsequent conversation. Mark Cuban suggests a broad definition of a splog:

any hosted website that only uses redirected or copied content and doesnt add any unique value. Aggregation is not value add. Why ? Because a search on any blog engine should uncover the unique content on their original source

I somewhat agree with Cuban (although the theory needs some refining)--and take it one step further: aggregated content with that personal touch should, eventually, create some conversation.

Conversation, though, doesn't always have to be on the blog...it can happen in email or on forums, too. If the blogger is involved with his/her blog beyond being a content aggregator, he/she can create short posts around email and thus demonstrate that one has community.

Yet, fundamentally, there seems to be a problem with the perceptions of blogs and blogging, in part because of the current emphasis on monetization and on persons as brands and their networks as markets. This kind of thinking makes the motive for cribbing someone's content understandable--they want to make some money on *your* content. Yet people aren't *just* brands, our groups of friends aren't *just* markets, and is a person's reason for blogging (or splogging)*always* with an eye on monetization? We are more than those narrow little pidgeonholes. I *think* Mark Cuban gets it--but does Steve Rubel get it?

Weblogs
Splog, Blogs
Blogging

Technosailor likes Snarkaholic! but I did have to straighten him out about something...I'll forgive him though...but just this once. next time, a spanking... ;-)

Toward a Definition of Civility

So, I missed blogging about Mena Trott and Ben Metcalf's bustup at Les Blogs, but

Nancy White blogs about it as a precursor to our SXSW Panel titled Us and Them: A Blog Conversation Guide...

and I'll pass along this clip of it all courtesy of sean that shows what went down.

However, I will make this observation on the whole thing: in the blogosphere, there's a great misunderstanding about what is/is not civil. Ben gives an interesting breakdown of it, which points out that the notion of civility varies from culture to culture. In the blogosphere, we are creating a culture that is pan-global and our mores are bound to clash. What we have here in this realm is a mix of mores and attitudes about civility. Even from my own observation of the speech, Mena's ideas of civility are very touchy-feely. Ben's ideas are rooted more in the idea that two persons can disagree (and disagree greatly) but not have that disagreement be personal. I would have felt the way that Ben did--that I was being patronized by Mena's comments.

However, what is also caught up in the exchange between Mena and Ben is the problem of IRC backchannel conversations at conferences being posted on a screen behind a speaker. While it is indeed a civility issue, it is a different issue from what Mena seems to address in her speech. Frankly, projecting the IRC chat is simply rude, rude, rude and doesn't add any sort of "texture" to a presentation. Perhaps if we consider "texture" something like the hockey match-style brawls in the Korean Parliment...but I don't think most of us would want to have that happen at a conference. So, the solution is simple: if attendees want to have a conversation, that's fine. Tell everyone where it's going on, and let them find it. But don't upstage the speaker-- because when you upstage the speaker, you end up annoying those of us who actually want to hear what the speaker has to say! Perhaps we're paying good money to hear someone and don't want to be distracted by your idle chit-chat!

There. It's just that simple.

civility usthem

Where Do Your Readers Come From??

As I mentioned the other day, Greg Gershman at Blogdigger.com keeps a nice little blog. Recently he wrote a great post on how people find blogs, where he references a short discussion on it between Scoble and Scoble's buddies...

I don't know...I don't quite see myself and Scoble and friends on the same level. Sure, we're both bloggers, but he is far more well-known and people will even search under his name to find him.

Heck, people might even know some of Scoble's friends and search under their names rather than under the subject their blogging about.

So, a discussion by Scoble about how people find other people's blogs is, well, kind of like George Bush I going into J.C. Penney and trying to buy socks...

On the other hand, Greg makes a couple of good comments about Google's dominance of blogsearches. No, people do not find conversations via Google searches. They do, though, search for seriously obscure things and find blogs. Often, my other blog gets hits from people searching the gosh-darndest subjects, some of which actually make me blush! But, as noted in a comment on a post titled
When is a Fetish Not a Fetish?, one of the Googlers actually appreciated what I'd wrote on the subject and left a really great "thank you" comment.

So, apparently, I'm a "trusted voice" on something! ;-)

Greg also comments about use of RSS feeds. Considering yours truly is horrifically tech-inept, I'm still having a devil of a time figuring out a couple of RSS readers I signed up for, so I don't even think of using RSS to find conversation. Rather, I've begun exploring various tags for Recently Posted stuff.

But what about people finding me? With this blog, they come from all sorts of interesting places, including "unknown" and sometimes under a search for Spap-Oop, which is Doo-Dads upsidedown and backwards (Doo-Dads being a Sunshine Biscuit manufactured snack food no longer in existence--so, yes, I'm also an expert on obscure snackfoods.) Although the other day I did receive an email from someone who got a link to this blog via an email from a friend...but I believe that accounts for a very small portion of the people who read this blog.

It seems that, with this blog, I'm in Google searches, and Topix.net searches, and a few other searches on other search engines, including Greg's. Of the other Big Three, MSN and Yahoo searches haven't hit me yet, and that *could* be because this blog neglects a certain rule of Search Engine Optimization: that a website will get more hits when the name and the URL correspond (it certainly makes searching for the site much easier--and makes it easier to remember).

So, I'm curious to know, fellow Average Bloggers...where do some of your readers come from?

Blogging Blog Blogs Culture media new media

A short time ago, I removed the link to my personal blog from the sidebar. I've recently restored that link.

Blogging with "The Real Thing"

While waiting to see Walk the Line (the really great Johnny Cash biopic), a slide flashed on the screen advertising blogging at MyCoke.com.

If I'd had coke in my mouth at that moment, it would have come spewing out my nose.

I was aghast--amused, yet horrified. First, that they were blatantly ripping off MySpace.com. Secondly that the folks at Coke have the cojohnes to believe that they will be able to establish a blogging community around a soft drink

I read the Privacy Policy (came up in a pop-up window with no URL) which has a specific provision for children under 13.

Obviously, they are aiming their "blogging" community feature at very young people.

Rob Capriccioso out in Washington D.C. heard about this MyCoke thing back in July and blogged about the ridiculousness of it. Funny thing is, at that time, they must've been testmarketing it because they used the term journaling (as Rob notes) rather than blogging. (I have to agree with a lot of Rob's assessment of the whole thing)

Guess someone hipped them on the proper term before letting Coke push the idea on those of us out here in the hinterlands of Massachusetts.

Either way, there's something kind of creepy about asking people keep their "blogs" on a site hosted by the Coca-Coal Bottling Company. But, there may indeed be enough naive parents out there who will have no problem letting their children spew their most intimate thoughts to a corporation.

After all, there's just a lot of perverts over there at MySpace...and we can't tell the kids they're too young to have a blog...oh, no...that would be squashing their creativity....

More and more I keep thinking Rollerball.....

Blogging Blog Blogs Culture media new media

What's Alll This Then? A Hit from Blogdigger.com

Checking the referring links on my stats today, I noticed I received my first hit from a search on Blogdigger.com.

Someone decided to search Pluck.com, and a particular piece that I did where I mentioned Pluck (and their very nice reps) came up in the search. Said person who did search also came over and looked at thisahere blog.

So I went over to check things out at Blogdigger.com myself.

It's a curious little site, pretty spare in appearance, and offers searches for Links, Media, Local and Groups. Since I'm always looking for local bloggers (and often finding few to none other than the folks listed on Masslive.com), I was hoping that this feature would help.

No such luck. The closest blogger was four miles away. And I know there are some just over the border in Springfield, so the Local search didn't work all that well.

I also did Links searches to see if I had any more links listed on Blogdigger than I do on Technorati and IceRocket.com (the two search tools that give me the best number of links). Blogdigger came up with nothing for Snarkaholic and a handful for my other blog.

It seems that, at this point, Blogdigger isn't all that helpful to me in my searches for local bloggers nor for people who link to me (and y'all can sit there and say searching's all about finding "kick-ass content," but, hey, sometimes it's all about Me...isn't it that way for you, too?? c'mon, be transparent--you know you like the ego stroke too....)

However, they have their own nice little blog! Kept by Greg Gershman, CEO and Founder of Blogdigger, the Blogdigger Development Blog has some great observations and commentary on a number of blogospheric things, including the Interactive Local Media Conference (and some commentary by Scoble on finding blogs, which I will have a great deal to say about in a subsequent blog post.)

So, if you don't get much of a rise out of Blogdigger's search capabilities, read the blog. It's kinda fun!

search engine, Blogging Blog Blogs media citizen journalism

When Everything We Do (including blogging) Is An Addiction

After perusing today's New York Times, I have determined that we live in a time where every breath, tick, or activity we engage in that is not directly related to work or family is considerd an addiction. Hooked on the Web: Help is on the Way (in the Style section, no less) details the problem that so many of us seem to be developing with our excessive/obsessive Internet use.

Here's the skinny on onlineaholics

These specialists estimate that 6 percent to 10 percent of the approximately 189 million Internet users in this country have a dependency that can be as destructive as alcoholism and drug addiction, and they are rushing to treat it. Yet some in the field remain skeptical that heavy use of the Internet qualifies as a legitimate addiction, and one academic expert called it a fad illness.

Skeptics argue that even obsessive Internet use does not exact the same toll on health or family life as conventionally recognized addictions. But, mental health professionals who support the diagnosis of Internet addiction say, a majority of obsessive users are online to further addictions to gambling or pornography or have become much more dependent on those vices because of their prevalence on the Internet.

But other users have a broader dependency and spend hours online each day, surfing the Web, trading stocks, instant messaging or blogging, and a fast-rising number are becoming addicted to Internet video games.

I don't know...sounds more like it's just easier in many ways to do stuff on the 'net than it is to go out and do it. When there's no longer a town square to venture out to, when one has to drive from here to there, and never meets a friendly soul, one might just as soon spend more quality time online than in the physical world.

Sometimes the better community is online rather than in one's own backyard.

Perhaps, though, this is just the disease-du-jour. In an article titled "Our National Eating Disorder" (NYT 10/17/04), our problem then was carbophobia We'd developed such a reverence for Atkins-style diet programs that many of us here and across the Pond in the U.K. were developing an unhealthy aversion to breads, pastas and potatoes. We were neglecting the need for healthy carbs, and were getting hysterical over Panina Bread places moving into our neighborhoods.

Personally, I think our latest "addiction" is just another buzzword for some enterprising shrinks to solemly banter around, then sell it to some poor souls who have a general existentialist angst about life and feel a pathological need to patholigize themselves.

The problem isn't with unhealthy internet use, or an unhealthy aversion to carbos, but an unhealthy and bovine-like acceptance of psychobabble.

Makes me long for the days of simple patholigies like "sex addiction"...and Bill Clinton.

Now, where'd I put that bag of potato chips?? I'm gonna be here for awhile....

psychology Culture Blogging Blog Blogs media Computers and Internet

Because Cross-Linking Creates Community....

Ron Brynaert, who writes the most excellent Why Are We Back in Iraq? (and has been linked in the NY Times, of all places), recently wrote a great piece on titled Blogroll Purge about--what else?--purging his blogroll of links that do not link to him.

Ron's discovered that it doesn't pay to link to people who won't give *you* the time of day and link back. He's realized what I realized when I started doing this blog-thing on a personal level--that if you're not linking back and forth to each other, you're not creating community.

If you're not linking, and you're not creating community, you and others with whom you share common ground, stand to lose--in many ways. Ron sees it thru a political lens. In Blogroll Purge he notes how the right seems to have a big thing about all that linklove, but the left seems to be as snooty as a Hollywood double-cheek airkiss. Ron is very right to note that this gives right-wing bloggers more clout in the blogosphere. It gives them more links to more supporting viewpoints, that's for sure.

I see it in simple, social terms--if I like you enough to link to you, just link back. If I find out you've linked to me, I'll link back to you. Kiss, kiss--Link, link.

I've heard the excuse from some bloggers that they will not link to someone who links to them because they think the linking blog doesn't reflect their blog's sensibilities. Please. Are all your friends exactly like you all the time? Blogrolls should be about diversity. We should be able to demonstrate that we aren't so fixated that we can't read content that isn't completely parallel with ours. If we want to shatter the image of blogs as being nothing more than echo chambers (and, believe me, MSM loves to tout that bit about us), listing blogs that are not our mirror image shows that we're open to being more than navel gazing diarists and that we can converse with others.

And even if someone IS a navel-gazing diarist, if the writing's good, then I just might link. If someone's a Rush Limbaugh right wing, Shania Twain-lovin' navel gazer....well, I might have to think a couple of times about that....then again, they'd have to think twice about me, too...

Now, yes, there's the problem of A-listers and links. There are indeed A-listers who get far too many requests for links from their blogs to the rest of the blogosphere. I tend to think that A-listers should just be left to themselves--unless we're lucky enough to establish peer-to-peer communications with the ones who are open to such a thing. Some are, some aren't. Many are no longer providing permalinks, but many will provide postlinks which can be great for us Upstart bloggers. But I don't believe it's necessary to immediately link to A-listers when we start our blogs to prove something about ourselves or about our blogs. What are we proving? That we can give a link to someone the rest of the world already knows about?

I link to a few "A-list" types, but that's because it's easier for me to go to their blogs from my blog. It's also way for my little blog to show up in their stats. If they bother to look, it *may* get them over here. No other reason that that.

Further, how A-listers want to handle their blogrolls and links is up to them. If you think about it, some of those A-list blogs aren't even blogs in the same sense that many of us are blogs....in the sense that they are not looking to interact and build any kind of community. They are content providers, that's it. If you're into reading their content, then read it. But don't look for community in a space dedicated just to telling *you* what's what.

Likewise, if some blogs have a huge number of comments, but the blogger (or bloggers)let the comments ramble like an unmoderated USENET newsgroup, then let them be just that-- unmoderated USENET newsgroups. Personally, I don't participate in blogs of that sort. Why should I? I had my share of Forums/Newsgroups years ago with alt.goth and the New York Times Film Forums. Forums are one kind of social software and blogs are another. I'm posting on a blog to get to know the blogger and his/her commenters who also blog--I'm not interested in numbskulls who don't know the first thing about blogging and probably hate bloggers but love to leave comments on blogs because they think blogs are their new Forums.

So, the message is easy: those of us out here in the Long Tail--well, we need to work together, support one another and give each other that permalink when we discover we've been linked to. (If I've missed anyone in my blogroll, let me know. I'll provide a cross-link)

And if you think the whole blogroll thing's too much of a pain-in-the-ass, but you still want to give props to posts or people you think are great, then postlink...which I will do right here for Sean Coon's blog because he recently postlinked on his blog to mine.

Gotta share the linkluv, baby! Purge that deadweight! provide that perma or postlink! Because if we don't, there's no community. If there's no community, there's no point...

Blogging, Blog, Blogs, linklove, community

Blog Migration

I am considering migrating this blog to another URL to enhance my Search Engine Optimzation criteria. I think that I may be missing a number of readers because the URL and the title of the blog do not correspond and people have to search to find me. That's unfortunate. I may also have to change the title to something like Snarkolholica to get the two to correspond.

I found that some buttwipe claimed the snarkaholic.blogspot.com URL and is holding it hostage. Nothing like bogarting someone else's idea....

I'd appreciate any comments regarding migrating this blog. It's a big decision.

I've been selected to be on a panel at the SXSW Interactive Festival! I'm so super excited!

The panel is Us and Them: A Blog Conversation Survival Guide

There's alot to think about in this topic. I just keep thinking about my strange experience on Alas, a Blog and the gentlemanly art of disagreeing with someone's opinion while still remaining friendly. Alot of folks--both men and women--have a bit of trouble understanding that concept.

It also makes me think of "echo chamber" arguments that are levelled against blogs. Not all are echo chambers, but some often end up looking like unmoderateed USENET newsgroups.

oh, and I'm also indexed by Topix.net! You can find me under Chicopee, MA and in a few other spots, too. I seem to be the solo blogger out of Chicopee at the moment (although the indexed stories aren't the Chicopee-related ones.) I'm fascinated by Topix. There seems to be alot of room to grow with it and it could end up being a valuable search tool.