Rick Webb dot net

PART THE FIRST: COMMENTS AND BLOGS

Okay I’ve been reading all this stuff lately about comments being so passé and blogs without comments being like the cool thing because who comments anyway and all comments are complaints and it’s not a real conversation, man. I totally totally don’t get this. Where does it come from? I mean I guess if you have like 50 million comments? I love the comments we get here on TBG. I love the back and forth. I have been adding tickets to our backlog (well, in my head anyway) to improve upon it all. And I see the nice debates going on in places like Silicon Alley Insider and even on Noah’s blog and the authors commenting back and it just seems rad. And, I mean, I’ve been reading blogs and blogging for… hell, I dunno…. eight years now?

Plus, it drives me crazy when I read someone’s blog – usually a friend’s – and I want to comment on something like in Buzz Anderson’s blog here or Jakob’s blog here and then I have to like go and email them my comment, which they never get because I always forget to actually do it or something, and even if they do, then no one else sees it, etc., etc. I am totally confused. Why is this a good thing? Maybe we should become more editorial in our acceptance of comments? More viscous in our removal of them? I do this on my Rock Tourist blog. I leave almost every comment I get screened.

PART THE SECOND: SLOW BLOGGING

I do think there’s something evolving, though. Scoble’s right, blogging is changing. But I think it’s not a bad thing. Basically, right now, blogging is all daily newspapers. Like most blog entries (mine excepted, of course), are quick hits – some news comes out, we leave our thinking on it and we move on. It’s the first pass. We rarely re-visit topics, and everyone wants to blog first. I’ve been tempted upon this a few times recently. Bits of internet-interesting information has come my way before the big blogs have picked it up – acquisition rumors, press releases for new products, famous internet millionaires having new girlfriends. Nothing related to my work or clients, of course, but still… and I’ve thought each time “oo I could totally blog this first and man I’d get so many hits” but I never really bother. I’ve always been more interested in the deeper thoughts and analysis. I’ve always been interested in the weeklies. When I was a kid I read US News & World Report religiously before graduating to The Economist in high school. Yes, I read The Economist in high school. This year marks my 20th year with the publication.

You could always get the news in a daily, but you never really got a full picture of things. When some shit is going down in the world – like the Myanmar tsunamis, election violence in Mozambique, privatization battles with Mexican oil companies or Indian votes of confidence around nuclear pacts with America – the daily news is always really confusing. I wait for the weeklies. I wait for the patient, unhurried in depth analysis. THAT is what we’re missing in blogs. We need weeklies. Sure, it’s funny when all you do are read weeklies and then all of the sudden everyone’s talking about AIDS again and for four days you don’t have any idea why until you finally get your new Economist and read about the new study. But then when you do learn about it, those four days of hyperbolic, hysteric buzzing have been nicely encapsulated and analyzed and contextualized, and you’ve spared your dear blood pressure four days of stress.

Why do so few bogs do that?

(As an aside, If I were a good blogger I would split this into two posts, and change the headline of the second post to WHY BLOGGING NEEDS WEEKLIES or something like that. But then I’d be a daily. I will add subheads – today only – as a compromise.)

I suppose this gets into the very nature of blogging. Is it blogging if you’re writing Foreign Affairs* length posts? Aren’t blogs supposed to be fresh and immediate? Isn’t it that immediacy that distinguishes a blog from other forms of “journalism?”

For that to all be true, I suppose, you’d have to posit that blogging is only a form of journalism, and that it’s the immediacy that makes it special. I disagree. I think the spirit of a blog is that it represents the musings, thoughts and interests of the person that is writing it. It’s a diary of what that writer is thinking about now. I think about things a lot. And when I start thinking about a topic, I think it through all the way. The blogging equivalent of the weeklies, I think, is nothing more than non-ADD blogging. Can’t deep thinkers blog too? Does Brian Eno have a blog? Thomas Pynchon? Mike Vickers? Sergei Brin? Would Nabokov had blogged?

The one blog that I know of that sort of does this – and I’ve really envied it for it – is ShareSleuth. Two posts this year! How awesome is that? Quality. Depth. And when they speak, people listen.

ADD bloggers sort of control the conversation, I think. But there’s this undercurrent in the whole thing – it’s as if they are willfully forcing themselves to believe that if they only think of the world in bite-size chunks, the world’s complexity will adapt to their tastes and will, eventually, be digestible in bite-size chunks. and because they have an echo chamber, and the ear of many people, they do sort of push the world in that direction a bit. But it seems to me it’s complete folly to think that it’ll be any more possible for them to change the world into their vision than it would be for the anti-”reality-based” conservative wonks. Many of these popular topics will always be complex. Alley Insider and Valleywag have taken a deep interest in the advertising-internet connection lately, trying to encapsulate the complicated relationships between brands, creative agencies, google, yahoo, startups, media companies, holding companies, interactive agencies, widget makers and white labels in these comically simple 2-3 paragraph posts. Having had a prime seat to that party for the better part of a decade now, I can see that their reporting is laughably light. No one talking has any inner knowledge of any of it, or any real understanding of what’s going on. It makes me wonder if this is how it is with all journalism. But then I read something like “The Real Dan Lyons”: http://realdanlyons.com/ in-depth take-apart of the PR cycle and spin game and I realize it doesn’t have to be that way. RDL should turn his blog into a “weekly”. He’s way more cutting edge in those posts than his quick-hits.

AH ah. The plane is landing. You are spared.

Oh and the 39 word Valleywag edtion:

Comments in bogs are good. Slow Blogging good. ADD Blogging does not make the world ADD with you. Things will still be complicated. Don’t be afraid. Figure it out. Learn something in depth. Take your time. Blogging needs more weeklies.