A Stitch in Haste

One Wired commentator thinks so:

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers.

I went through my first “blogging mid-life crisis” over the death of trackbacking in the wake of trackback spam, circa early 2006. There was no better way to pull in new readers than to insert a quick “More thoughts at …” linkfest, which would lead readers of the other blog back to mine. WordPress still offers trackbacking (and its internal equivalent, pingbacking), but the feature is essentially dead. And that’s a great loss for blogging.

And I probably could do a better job of inserting meta-data (e.g., Technorati tags) into the posts, or using outreach features such as Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon.

Still, I think that the piece puts the “doomed to failure” cart before the “why one blogs” horse. In order to fail at a goal, one must first know what the goal is. If one’s blogging goal is simply to be “widely read,” then perhaps the article is correct and the pursuit is futile. But what if the goal is merely to reach someone, especially in the same cultural niche as yourself? Not even Facebook (and certainly not Twitter) can outshine traditional blogging for, e.g., a gay libertarian to connect to other gay libertarians.

And then of course there is the sense of self-accomplishment that comes, not from being read, but from having written. It was Dorothy Parker who said, “I hate writing, but I love having written.” I embrace that attitude wholeheartedly. Think of Phineas secretly breaking the swim record in A Separate Peace, or Howard Roark saying to Peter Keating, “I will have designed Cortlandt.” All that matters is that I know what I’ve accomplished; for others to know is nice but not especially urgent. I care less about how many people read my blogposts than I care about making each post the best I could write, and thereby being proud of having written it.

One other observation:

Twitter — which limits each text-only post to 140 characters — is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004. … As a writer, though, I’m onto the system’s real appeal: brevity. Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter’s character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase.

First of all, expect that 140-character limit to expand, perhaps by orders of magnitude, as Twitter gains in popularity — much like memory in PCs and then iPods and cell phones.

More importantly, what’s so great about constraining Tweet length? It’s a bug, not a feature. The point of Twitter is to make microblogging easier, not to make it compulsory.

Throughout the early years of my blogging, I always resisted the urge to post one-line “check this out” posts in the style of Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan. I thought it would dilute and debase my blog. Now I have Twitter for that kind of posting. Those who trust my judgment can subscribe to my Twitter feed as well as to my blog. That enhances my franchise; it doesn’t constrict it.

Facebook, meanwhile, is a different creature altogether. Given its strict privacy controls, that is where I can really let my hair down and say anything (truthful) I want about anyone I want. Which, at this particularly moment, should make a certain group of people rather nervous, given the (truthful) things that I am quite eager to start saying about them. More on that somewhere down the road, when the time is right.

In any case, blogging, microblogging and social networking are no different than any other personal pursuit: you get out of it what you put into it. Furthermore, like any other personal pursuit, your expectations will either be reasonable or unreasonable. Sometimes the “failure” is in the expectations rather than the results. In that sense, the Internet really is nothing new.

The bottom line is that I am secure enough in my blogging to view Twitter and Facebook for what they are, tools to build, not tools to tear down.