kip/bot/blog

A friend in Facebook has an album called “pick me ups”:

I wish this were bigger on Facebook, because it’s a great way to help clients and others understand the varied uses of photo-sharing and having personal information on the web. This is an album full of great pictures of friends in very happy states, nieces and nephews, a few outdoor shots. From the title, she’s put them there so that she can browse through her pictures for a little emotional lift.

I’m sure meta is the wrong word, but there’s something meta-seeming about the title itself. It’s originally for her own consumption, a way to have her favorite pictures readily available, but there’s a willingness to share. It might be even stronger, that there’s an indifference to an audience — I will build it and don’t care if anyone comes, cuz I built it for me. That might be the reason for lower-case in the title.

My flickr photostream is kind of a mess in that sense. I put up pictures I want people to see, I put up images that amuse me and which I hope will amuse others, sometimes I use it as a note-taking device (a handyman sign on a light pole where the little number strips at the bottom are all taken away). I post a lot of screengrabs and scans there, cuz I want them for future reference.

Among marketers, the emphasis on audience size is still the first filter for any understanding of an internet experience. There are still concerns about quality of the audience, but size is a gating factor.

This emphasis on size of audience misses the complex relationship internet users have with their “audiences”. We’re not necessarily seeking one. My friend’s album above is indifferent to the audience. “Come if you want, I don’t care. This gallery is for me, I expect some of my friends will like it, but that’s not the point. So much so, that there might even be pictures I’d rather some of my friends not see, but that’s OK, cuz I want my pick me ups right here.”
We probably all have contacts on Flickr where the pictures get a little too personal, the jokes are a little too in, or they’re just getting insider goofy with their friends and there’s no reason to share. The only reason they’re being shared is because it’s too much work to lock it down. My own photostream is amused by the possibility of/semi-hopeful for an audience. The pics are there for me so I can send links around and have them available, but if someone shares my sense of humor or interest in Rosicrucian symbols, cool. I’m doing this blog partially to help sort out all the stuff I’m reading (I’m in a very unfocused stage right now, hoping it’s an plateau or inflection point). I am risking an audience rather than seeking on so that I’m forced not to write anything too stupid, and put a little thought and care into the writing.
Even within my industry (internet marketing), it’s a struggle to get people to understand the normalness of flickr and other types of sharing. A colleague of mine returned from a vacation in South America several months ago.  Eager to see pictures, I suggested now would be a good time to get into the Flickr stream. “Why would I want to put my pictures out for everyone to see?” My reply was “Not everyone . . . me!”, at which point, an offer was made to bring the pictures in. Sigh.

The NY Review of Books ran a piece by Sarah Boxer about blogs.  It’s a decent survey of the numbers and trends around blogs, and hits all the highlights (Washintonienne, etc.). There’s some entertainment value, such as the anthropological, 101 way Boxer explains blogs to effete, well-read, liberal subscribers to NYRB (the bracketed explanations of , WTF, and BTW add little smiles to the stream of words coming into the brain). But, what I love about it is that it looks at the style of blogs.

Writing like this might seem easy, but just try it. Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at Stanford who writes for newspapers and radio and sometimes contributes to the blog Language Log, admitted on NPR back in 2004, “I don’t quite have the hang of the form.” And, he added, many journalists who get called upon by their editors to keep blogs are similarly stumped: “They fashion engaging ledes, they develop their arguments methodically, they give context and background, and tack helpful IDs onto the names they introduce.” Guess what? They read like journalists, not bloggers.

Bloggers are golden when they’re at the bottom of the heap, kicking up. Give them a salary, a book contract, or a press credential, though, and it just isn’t the same. (And this includes, for the most part, the blogs set up by magazines, companies, and newspapers.) Why? When you write for pay, you worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. You worry about your boss, your publisher, your mother, and your superego looking over your shoulder. And that’s no way to blog.

Blogging at its freest is like going to a masked ball. …

Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that.