by Mathew on April 10, 2008
I’m sure someone at the New York Times has to be feeling pretty smug right now — after all, look at all the attention the paper’s story on bloggers is getting from the blogosphere. Obviously, the Times has learned the first rule of getting attention from blogs: talk about blogs. The Times also seems to have learned the second lesson, which is related to blog “trolling,” namely: associate blogs or blogging with some kind of apocalyptic or otherwise incendiary statement, viz. “Blogging kills.”
It’s true that the NYT didn’t actually use that phrase, but the story about two deaths (Russell Shaw from ZDNet and Marc Orchant, whose last gig was the ill-fated Blognation) and a near-death experience (Om Malik) in the blogosphere might as well have had that headline, as Marc Andreessen notes in his hilarious roundup of future potential New York Times headlines about blogging (including “Hitler probably blogged”).
Mike Arrington helps the Times out by saying he has gained 30 pounds, has a severe sleeping disorder and is on the verge of a nervous breakdown — which may be true, but could just as easily be said by someone who has become obsessed by major-league football during the playoffs, or someone whose hobby is building miniature ships in bottles. It has nothing to do with whether they spend every waking moment typing on a keyboard or obsessively checking Techmeme.
For me, the low point in the piece — which goes on to talk about how some bloggers for sites like Gizmodo spend dozens of hours blogging for pay from their tiny apartments — is when the Times coaxes this incendiary quote from blogger Matt Buchanan: sometimes, he confesses, he is so tired “I just want to lie down.” Stop the presses! (best quote comes from Gizmodo editor Brian Lam, who has trained as a Thai kick-boxer: “I’ve got a background getting punched in the face… that’s why I’m good at this job.” Definitely should have been higher up).
by Mathew on September 30, 2007
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.
