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A Response to Doc Searls

Doc Searls took some time to respond to my post on Nick Carr, so I thought it would only be right to take a moment to respond as well. -He was especially unhappy with my idea of considering A-listers “traffic cops.” I will be the first to admit that that was not a good metaphor to use. Here is Doc’s response:

For what it’s worth, I don’t consider my readers “traffic”. Nor do I consider my links to other blogs or sites a way of “directing” anything other than a reader’s interest.

If I thought of myself as a “traffic cop” of anything, much less the blogosphere, I’d hang it up.

And indeed, that’s what I should have called it. With “directing traffic”, I was referring more to directing attention than just moving people along, which I think is what the A-listers are doing and I don’t think Doc would agree with that.

Now Doc does not consider himself to be part of the A-List and I have to respectfully disagree with him there. His stats show that he has between 2500 and 10.000 hits per hour. To me, a small fry in the blogosphere, that’s a lot more than the 10 hits I often get per day. Also, the mindshare he has is far larger than the average blogger, which might also be due to being a regular on the Gillmor Gang.

I find it interesting, though, that everybody who is generally considered part of the A-List seems to deny this status. It almost seems like an American phenomenon to me, where everybody is middle-class and nobody wants to admit to being high-class (even when heading for their $6 Starbucks mocha in a Bentley on the way to a performance at Lincoln Center). Is there really a point in denying that there is an A-list? Do we have to deny that Dave Winer writes an influential blog? Or Mike Arrington? Or Doc Searls, for that matter? Why is it such a bad thing to point that out?

tags: doc+Searls, Searls, dave+winer, a-list, blogging, blogosphere, nick+carr, carr

This may seem amazing…. it’s amazing to ME, actually… Until I followed your stats link, I never saw the page that listed hourly hits on my blog. It’s going on seven years with this thing, and I never saw it.

I knew about my referer page, which I pointed to in some post or other recently. But I never even knew my hits were being kept track of. And I kind of liked not knowing, frankly.

What would a “hit” be in my case, anyway? A hit is a retrieved item, not a visit. A retriefed item might be a post, a graphic, whatever. Let’s see…

Okay, my browser here just told me it downloaded 28 items when it went to my blog. Let’s call it 25, so we can divide 10,000 by that. Comes to about 2500. That’s at the top end, roughly.

And that’s about what I find here: http://doc.weblogs.com/discuss/ .

The count for yesterday, about 1327, the day before about 2790.

That’s not nothing, but it’s way short of the many dozens of thousands claimed by Scoble, BoingBoing, Instapundit and many others that are way ahead of me in the Technorati Top Whatever (I fell out of the Top 100 a while ago).

Still, you can rank that, I guess. Just like you can rank anything.

But I still believe there *is* a point of denying there’s an A-list: You don’t need one. Technorati’s Top 100 is a collection of stats that have been changed before and will be changed again. They are interesting only insofar as they serve the natural human urge to rank people.

As I’ve said many times before, the whole X-list business is one of the things I liked getting *away* from when I started blogging. They are interesting, but not what matters.

What matters here is Scoop Nisker’s advice, from decades ago: “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.”

Your odds of doing that are far better with blogging than with any other journalistic practice –even if you start out as a blogger with no connections or friendships with anybody else on the Web.

Write useful, quotable, interesting stuff, and credit others generously — and you’ll be heard, aggregated, added to blogrolls and all the rest of it.

I don’t want to deny what influence I have. But I would much rather celebrate the opportunity that anybody has to enjoy the same, or more. That’s what’s great about blogging.

And by saying so I am not an apologist or an evangelist for blogging. I am merely reporting one fact that can be denied only by those who insist that all forms of success must have its victims.

And let’s face it: there are countless blogs on countless subjects about which the handful of individuals on your blogroll have nothing to say and over which they enjoy zero influence. Fashion, real estate, art, sports, science, education, politics, cars… and those are just a few that jump to mind. Each of those topics have their A-lists, and each of those A-lists are just as artificial and arbitrary and temporary as the Technorati Top 100. Anybody anywhere can lead blog conversations in any of those topics if they write new, interesting and quotable posts about them. That fact matters more than any list.

Are there games you can play? Sure. Mention the current conversational leaders in your posts and you’re likely to get quoted and added to aggregators faster. Is this any different, however, than saying hello and shaking hands at a party? It’s just good common sense.

I’ve experienced class in my life. I know what it’s like to be part of many different z-lists: social ones, economic ones, academic ones, athletic ones, appearance ones, fashion ones, cultural ones … And ALL of them were much more fixed, much less fair, and much harder to change than the ones we find in the blogosphere.

That’s why this whole thread drives me nuts. It’s like we’re saying “The glass is 9/10 empty!” and “This is just like ______” And you fill in the blank with whatever it was that victimized you as a kid. Not being chosen for a team, getting bad grades, being stigmatized for whatever made you different or less advantaged.

The blogosphere may be a little like high school, but jeeez… the ’sphere is SO much more open and meritocratic and flat-out hackable than just about anything it resembles in daily life.

Anyway, sorry to run on about this. But you took the trouble to respond, and I thought it was worth both our time to respond back.

Thanks,

Doc

“Write useful, quotable, interesting stuff, and credit others generously—and you’ll be heard, aggregated, added to blogrolls and all the rest of it.”

No, you will languish forever in the unheard underbelly of oh-gee-you’re-connecting-with-people-isn’t-that-the-bestest.

What evidence would you ever accept to prove your statement wrong?

“the ‘sphere is SO much more open and meritocratic”

Where Are The Women? (and the people of color too)

That is, it’s very arguable that the bogosphere is WORSE. Again, WORSE. This is because it’s retrograde in several ways in terms of social progress.

Repeat: What evidence would ever suffice to convince you?

Doc,

Thank you for taking the trouble to respond. I think in the end we agree on almost every point, especially when it comes to the blogosphere having the ability to do away with the distinctions of class, gender etc. I think we also agree when it comes to the blogosphere having a far lower barrier for entry as opposed to journalism or, for that matter, any other form of media.

I think the problem many of us who do not belong to the upper echelon of the blogosphere and who are not connected outside of the ’sphere have is that even though we might write quotable stuff and do so regularly, we might end up toiling completely unnoticed. And lets face it, we are all writing because we want to get noticed – otherwise we would not do it.

Yet, the fact that we are having this discussion here and that you noticed my posts and took the time to comment on them validates your arguments and I have to concede that point. However, I had to drop names to do so. If I, unconnected student that I am, had just written a post on Nick Carr, I doubt I would have gotten any recognition for it.

But then, many a blogger is not looking for wide recognition. They might be blogging for their family and friends and be quite happy to see that nobody is actually linking to them and not caring about being read by anybody else.

I will have to formulate a longer post on this later tonight when I get these thoughts a bit more ordered – just wanted to get this out into the comments for now.

So I think we both believe that the ideal is indeed that X-lists shouldn’t matter. That’s what the promise of the blogosphere is. The question now is, how do we realize this ideal?