An interesting piece in the New York Times today (although it was in the Fashion & Style section, which I thought was a little odd). I’m not sure if the topic signals some kind of evolution in the way the Times looks at the blogosphere or an evolution in the blogosphere itself — or maybe a bit of both.
It’s about people who have become known — “Internet famous” — not for having a popular blog, or for being a YouTube star, but for commenting on other people’s blogs and content (no doubt an academic somewhere will call this “meta-blogging.”) As the Times piece puts it:
“Since many blogs have a readership of one — or, at best, the writer, his mother and some guy he sat next to in seventh grade who found him on Google — piggybacking on a more popular site offers a wider audience for a keyboard jockey’s gripes and quips. Not everyone is up to the task of creating a blog with the kind of consistent tone and provocative topics that attract visitors.”
The Times piece profiles a Metafilter commenter known as DaShiv, as well as Seth Chadwick, who posts on a food-related site called Chowhound. But my favourite quote comes from Marshall Poe, a professor of new media at the University of Iowa, who describes the motivation of commenters in this way:
“You are one of the millions of people who sit at a computer all day… every hour you have 10 minutes where you’re not doing anything productive at work, and you can’t look at porn. So you make a comment and fulfill this desire to show yourself off as a smarty-pants.”
The Times piece also talks about a commenter on Gawker, where the site picks and chooses who will be allowed to comment, and so a competition has developed where people try to post the wittiest comments so that they can join the club. Now that’s social networking. And DaShiv explains why he prefers to comment at Metafilter rather than starting his own blog.
I’m not sure Choire is quite right on that one. I admit that ghettoizing blogs doesn’t seem quite right either, or grouping them together just because they’re blogs. But I also think that if the word means anything to people at all, it means a personal take on something — and one that encourages (hopefully) reader interaction in the form of comments, etc. I often look for blogs because I know they will give me that, and I expect others do as well. Choire makes a good point about lots of bloggers “screaming into the void,” with nary a comment on them — presumably because readers can’t find them. In many cases, I suspect that this is because the papers in question are making fairly poor use of things like prominently displayed RSS feeds, keywords that are hooked into Technorati or some other blog indexing engine, and the ability to ping blog search engines with new posts. 
What makes this story so odd, as Valleywag and TechCrunch point out, is that Leah is part of (or was part of) the Digg inner circle, and helped create Pownce with Digg founder Kevin Rose. She also reportedly used to be in a relationship with Daniel Burka, a (Canadian) UI designer who has worked on both Digg and Pownce. I realize that all of this strays into the Perez Hilton, celebrity-gossip end of the spectrum, but I still find it fascinating. Was it an inside joke? A 3 a.m. post that shouldn’t have been published? 
Now, there are reports (since confirmed) that she has parted company with ABC — where she was doing occasional video reports — and there has been hardly a peep. Why? Hard to say, really.
