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Friday Fronts
1 February 2008:
Sarah Boxer on Blogs, in The New York Review of Books.
Not long ago, I spied an arresting title on a "new nonfiction" table at a good bookstore. If you ask me now, the book didn't belong there. Blogging Heroes, by Michael A Banks, is a collection of thirty interviews with "30 of the World's Top Bloggers," supplemented with minimal background information, that amounts to a DIY self-help book. The chapters, which follow a uniform structure, end telling with a list of bullet "Points to Review." Here is the list at the end of an interview with Mark Frauenfelder, of "the most popular blog in the world," BoingBoing.net:
— Write about your passions.
— Resist the urge to write a post just to get something out there. If you think before you post, you won't have to edit your posts later.
— Put yourself in your reader's place before you write. Ask yourself what a reader will find interesting about your topic, or why the topic is important. Write down the answers and use them as a guide when you are writing the post.
— Write a descriptive headline for ever post. Many readers browse headlines (especially those who use RSS) and won't stop to read a post that hasn't been clearly described.
— Always link to sources of information in your posts. This encourages others to link back.
— Don't worry about being the first to report something new. It's unlikely you'll be able to do that. Instead, focus on expressing ideas clearly and with enthusiasm.
The difference between this list and the twenty-nine others in Blogging Heroes is, to put it very nicely, subtle.
I did not pick up Blogging Heroes because I expected to find any explicit tips toward making The Daily Blague a better site. It was just possible, I thought, that I might uncover the germ of an idea about bringing the blog (and Portico as well) to the attention of people who might find it interesting — a class of readers, in my opinion, that is fairly certain that projects such as mine don't exist. For the most part, though, I bought the book simply to be informed about who the worlds thirty top bloggers might be and what they might be up to. Glancing over the table of contents, I was piqued by the omission of a few sites that I consider big-time, but I recognized enough of the names to conclude that Mr Banks's universe wasn't altogether parallel. As someone who takes blogging seriously (far too seriously, some might complain), it behooved me to know the territory.
What I've learned — and it comes as something of a surprise — is that blogging is a way to make money. This is not to say that fortunes are being made in the blogosphere as a matter of course. Rather, it means that blogging is a commercial opportunity. In the prevailing free-market discourse, there is no difference between being remunerated for doing something and doing something in order to be remunerated, but Mr Banks and his bloggers are aware of the distinction, because they warn over and over again against simply trying to make a buck. In order to succeed at blogging, readers are told, you must do something that you are passionate about. To be aware of the distinction, however, is not necessarily to honor it. Among the "Points to Review" appended to the interview with Frank Warren, the almost other-worldly founder and operator of the adamantly non-commercial blog Post Secret, there are no hints about getting by without advertising, even though Mr Warren acknowledges that he earns income from speaking about his site and from other events associated with it. That's all very nice, but Mr Banks's readers want to make it with a blog. There are other books to teach you how to make money in public speaking.
Blogging Heroes is not among the titles reviewed by Sarah Boxer in "Blogs," a report in the current issue of The New York Review of Books; the cluster of Ms Boxer's books orbits much closer to home. The bloggers written up here are not preoccupied, or, in many cases, even occupied, by compensation. Self-expression is their objective, and Ms Boxer has a lot of fun proffering examples of the virtual argot that, far too busy posting fresh entries to explain themselves, they concoct out of context. The gist of blogging, however, is very much the same as it is for the World's Top Bloggers.
You get the point. Bloggers breeze through places, people, texts, and blogs that you might or might not know without providing any helpful identification. They figure that even if they don't provide you with links you can get all the background you need by Googling unfamiliar terms, clicking through Wikipedia (the collaborative on-line encyclopedia) or searching their blog's archives.
The very tone of most blogs—reactive, punchy, conversational, knowing, and free-associative—is predicated on linkiness and infused with it. And that's no accident. Once upon a time blogs were nothing but links with bits of commentary.
Consider this advice from Ina Steiner, of the eBay-related site, AuctionBytes:
One e-Bay seller I know writes a blog devoted to mugs, and he includes pictures, descriptions, and advice on the interesting mugs he finds. This is a great way to serve his customers by providing content that's of interest to them. In addition, he builds up a following of people who are more likely to buy from him in the future, and shoppers doing searches for those types of products will find his blog — and his listings.
Show potential shoppers that you are a professional who knows the ins and outs of the products you sell, and they will feel more comfortable shopping [on your site and buying] from you. But if you're publishing for clients or customers, avoid politics and religion — save that for your personal blog.
Where you can treat it in exactly the same way, as a frontier of breaking news as eager to be linked as the West was to be Won — if that's what suits you. Aware my attitude here is not untinctured by disdain, I hasten to insist that I have no objection to any of the blogs that Mr Banks and Ms Boxer write about. They might not interest, but I applaud their enterprise, commercial or not, because they are experimenting with an unprecedented form of communication, one that does for general discussion what the post office and the telephone have done for personal exchange. What I do complain about is the unspoken assumption that the blogging s necessarily either utilitarian or spontaneous or both. That the bulk of letters written in the past millennium certainly discussed no more than everyday plans and arrangements — tariffs and timetables — seems not to have discouraged Lord Chesterfield from exploiting epistolary form for the edification of his bastard, but the idea that anyone might be similarly expansive with that more recent correlatives of the post, the Web log, seems not to have dawned. The imagination of the bloggers whom Sarah Boxer has looked at is extends no further than a certain high-school peppiness.
Bloggers give new, Web-inflected meanings to old words. A "troll" on the Web is someone who posts provocative things just to cause an outcry. "Astroturfing" is creating a fake grassroots movement. Bloggers also sprinkle their blogs with expressions like WTF (translation: "What the fuck?"), lol (laugh out loud), and meh (a verbal shrug). They willfully misspell—like "teh" for "the." They call the Internet "the internets," cutely following George W. Bush's slip. If people wrote like this for publication, they'd be fired. And, indeed, there is a term for getting canned because of your blog: "dooced," named for the blogger Dooce, now a stay-at-home-mother (SAHM) or, as she puts it, a "Shit Ass Ho Motherfucker," who got fired for blogging about her employer.
Writing for an audience that presumably couldn't care less about advertising revenue, Ms Boxer seems unaware of the significance of the fact that most of Mr Banks's subjects stress the importance of clear writing. If his bloggers are no more likely to be taken on as NYRB staffers, it's not because they write like willfully sloppy adolescents.
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. ;-)
If that is how you would characterize the writing at The Daily Blague, or at the run of blogs to which the DB offers links, then let me know about it. If not, then please let your friends — one of whom may just know Sarah Boxer — about me.
Copyright (c) 2008 Pourover Press