Tiffany B. Brown

a mish-mosh of stuff

Blogging: Reclaiming the definition

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I’ve had a few conversations and thoughts about blogging in the last few days: what it is, how it’s changed, what we are getting out of it, and whether being a personal blogger is worth the time and effort it takes.

I’ve been thinking about this since my 2005 presentation at ConvergeSouth. I looked at the blogging landscape then, when Technorati’s Top 100 still mattered, and making lists was all the rage. It was clear, even then, that big brands, group blogs, and upper-income, white, male geeks dominated the conversation space.

Dave Winer was in the audience for the session giving me a bit of grief about my argument. My point was a simple one: the “blogosphere” is just replicating our offline voices, culture, beliefs, and power structures online. I pointed to blogs like BoingBoing and DailyKos as examples of sites that get all the glory, traffic, ad revenue, and media coverage.

Winer’s response: “Well, those aren’t really blogs.”

My counterpoint at the time — and I don’t think I said it out loud, but I sure did think about it a lot and had really did intend to write a post — was “Who decides what is and isn’t a blog?”

This point came up again during a recent conversation with J. We were — or at least I was — lamenting the current condition of ‘blogging’ as we know it. What was a personal publishing platform, a genre of website, and a close(-ish) community of writers and readers has been co-opted by major media corporations and overwhelmed by ad-supported, multiple-author mega blogs.

Or maybe Winer was right: those aren’t blogs. Maybe blogging is inherently about individuals and not about audience, growth, mindshare, or that wackest of wack buzzwords: monetization. How can we reclaim that definition and draw distinctions between ‘blogs’ — content written by an individual, not a staff — and “highly-trafficked web site with opinion and analysis pieces that allow comments?” How can we return ‘blogging’ to to it’s definition of being conversations between individuals and not let it be redefined by corporations and profiteers?

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  • tiffany
    Erica and Michelle, I don't know that I have a problem with individuals blogging about their cities, etc. It's still an individual's voice. And that's good.

    I think my issue is with marketers and big corporations morphing blogging -- what it is, how it's done and how we understand it, it's core culture, I guess -- into something very impersonal and mass rather than individual.

    I'm of two minds here: is a blog (or is blogging) the format or the act? Is it the post or the conversation? Is it content dependent or independent?

    I agree with Cecily's point really: blogging is a lot less fun these days. The old culture of blogging has shifted because there are so many new voices in the mix. And while that's the point and promise of the Internet, it also makes it harder to form the kinds of communities and connections that made blogging enjoyable.
  • I think the distinction I would draw between 'How can we reclaim that definition and draw distinctions between ‘blogs’ — content written by an individual, not a staff — and “highly-trafficked web site with opinion and analysis pieces that allow comments?”' is quite easy.

    A web site with a staff, writing opinion and analysis pieces, is no different from what in the print medium would be called a magazine (or at least, a fanzine). Just because they allow readers to post comments, doesn't change the essential "magazine-ness" of it - I am sure the letters page in many magazines would be a lot longer if it didn't cost money for the paper!

    The terminology I would use is therefore "online magazine" for the "ad-supported, multiple-author mega blogs".
  • The more I get sucked into a media/citizen journalism sphere that I'm not sure I want to be in on account of the fact that I blog about local stuff...

    ...the more I find myself saying "I'm just a blogger" and
    ...the more I second-guess my choice of that word "blogger" and
    ...the more I ask myself what that connotation is, exactly.

    As I try to maintain a cityblog AND a topic/niche blog AND a personal blog, the more cognitive dissonance I experience because all three require very different approaches. Clearly I saw a need to separate that stuff out, but life would probably be simpler if I just blogged all that stuff in one place and was done with it. (I don't know where I'm going with this paragraph so I'll just end it.)

    Tiffany, it sounds to me like you're talking about separating the "method of publishing" definition of blogging from the "publisher" definition of blogger. I find myself falling back on the "blogger" title as a method of lowering other people's expectations of my content with the small hope of succeeding (whatever that is) in spite of myself. It's also a method of resisting the "citizen journalist" label that keeps getting tossed my way. I'll defend the right of blogging-as-a-publishing-mechanism to be a platform for citizen journalism, but I am not a citizen journalist.

    Maybe people just need to own the word "blogger" and call a spade a spade and not let other people who are threatened by the power of individual voices demean the word. So what if I am a blogger?

    The fact is that more people are flooding the channel. Isn't that supposed to be the beauty of it? Anyone can publish anything on the internet. So now that some early adopters are no longer the big fish in the small pond, [enter Tiff's statement of replicating offline culture and power structures here]. FWIW, I still think of all you guys mentioned and commenting here as influential. To me you are all still big fish. It's just that your small pond is, well, bigger.
  • Lynne: yes, media killed the blog star. Or rather, media killed the DIY spirit of blogging. Like I mentioned in the piece Tiffany linked to above, this whole chasing down list placements thing makes the idea of blogging as we now know it a lot less fun.

    That isn't to say that I don't think there's room for both kinds. I just wish the media would call it what it really is - public relations/marketing - and leave blogging for the rest of us.

    I read quite a few professional blogs, and nothing makes me happier than to see the success Michelle J. is having with Consuming Louisville, but FWIW, personal blogging is the only kind of blogging I'm interested in these days. I think it's why I'm so protective of services like Twitter and FriendFeed and the communities that spring up around them.
  • Are you guys saying media killed the blog star? That media co-opted blogging and turned it into journalism 2.0?

    As for what happened to you guys, you still matter. You still have a voice. It's just not so much about what you consider traditional blogging. The stuff you guys all do on FriendFeed and Twitter, and wherever else (Flickr, Vox, etc.) the lifestreaming stuff, and thinking stuff, and ranting stuff, and sharing stuff, that's your blogging 2.0. And you still have community and importance and conversations.

    No?
  • It's funny, being someone from that time period we're referencing with nostalgia who had NO influence then but a little bit of influence in my small pond now I'm really torn. I really miss the connections and the relationships we built back then and the conversations we had. Man, the conversations. And maybe that's what I miss the most. If Jason talked about something interesting I couldn't wait to see how Aaron or J or Cecily was going to respond to it because they all would either in Jason's comments or on their own sites. We were this little community and we were all in it together.

    Now I very rarely blog on anything personal or political but nearly every single good professional thing in my life comes from Consuming Louisville in some way. Consuming Louisville is what? It's just me, it's my personality, it's what I think is good but there I don't write about, say my conversion there, so is it a personal blog? No. I do run a few ads but very few and only ones that I approve and that have relevance to my audience. And again, it's just me, not a team of authors, so is it a "Pro Blog?" No. We've evolved into yet another new era of personal publishing and we don't yet have the labels and terminology to define it.
  • tiffany
    Maybe that's part of my beef too Jason. I want these n00bs off o' my lawn. I want people to follow old culture rules of linking and attribution. I want somebody other than my BF in California to read and comment on my blog entries. And now that a million other people are doing what I do, my contribution seems a lot less important and a lot more futile.

    I have to say that the rise of and my participation in other communities are partly to blame too. By the time I get the free time and mental space to write a blog entry about a topic, I've already ranted about it on Twitter and FriendFeed. And since the 20 people that read this blog are the same 20 people that follow me on Twitter and FriendFeed, I'd rather not clutter up y'alls feed readers with a post on the subject.

    Or maybe I just want to feel all cool and relevant again.
  • I think we get caught up in the term "blog" and what we think it means. For those of us of a certain blog-age, we think of the term as the idea of personal publishing, of idea sharing, and community interaction.

    We also think about it as influence. When the pool was smaller, an individual post always had significant potential (exponentially more than it does now) to cause a stir across the blogosphere.

    The Joe Boxer stuff that J. and I were a part of way back when is highly unlikely now. We could write the same things but our opinion isn't valued in the same way from the larger community.

    Now, the more likely scenario is if I write about something interesting, a writer with more influence will simply take the topic and write more about it or write about it slightly differently and reach their larger audience. No need for attribution, no need to link to the original piece. We're all in the soup and everybody's "blogging" so our deep and passionate conversations about linking and what not seem quaint.

    This is the part that's different. We old geezer bloggers don't matter much anymore. There aren't only 10 of us or 20 of us or 30 of us writing about the stuff we care about. There are hundreds of bloggers doing what I was doing at negro please.

    And, often, doing it better.

    I was hobbyist. These folks, some of them, have robust writing careers that include the online space. They should get more attention. Their information is better. Their writing is better. The only thing I have is my point of view and my friend community.

    Those parts of what we call blogging haven't gone away. There are robust intimate communities where individual posts can cause ripples vibrant on LJ and vox (and myspace and facebook and so on). If that's the kind of blog world I want, I can have it.

    But, if I'm being honest with myself, when I think about complaining about where blogging is today, what I'm really upset with is that I'm no longer relevant in the way I once was.

    Blogging blew up but didn't take me with it.
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