Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

And I always thought the bloatosphere was shaped like my fist getting ready to punch out a Pseudo Blog, Mommy Blog, Baby Blog, Link Farm, Cut%Paste Blog, or Fictional Character Blog.

There is no A list. There is no blogosphere. There are multiple blogospheria within one blogiverse.

Each community forms its own sense of a micro-blogosphere, a blogospheria, that it interacts with.

Incestuous link schemes, I call clinking. In normal usage it's known as blogrolls and bookmarked favorites, or feedrolls and feed aggregation.

We each assemble our own little "blogopocket", often a cul-de-sac from which we may not often escape.

I see #79 blog on BlogStreet, Alas a Blog, post photos of children, with blatant disregard for online predators.

An A List Bad Example.

So when we blog we are only leaving messages on an answering machine, we type into empty space, the digital effluvium...and hope it enters a humachine servo-mind. (This remark is for C. Lock)

May I use this post of yours in my new book: "Best & Bizarre Blogosphere"? Edelman, Joe Katz, Dean Esmay, etc. are already in. Thanks. I'll email my request, but I like using comments as Alt Email Apps.

:^)

That'll be "The Fat Middle" then.

Steven, I agree: The Long Tail has always been an oversimplification: It's all knotty with links. (The earth is flat, but it's also lumpy.)

As for including this post in a book: Nah. It's not a post I'm particularly proud of. Nor do I think it's particularly bizarre.

I'm beginning to get the feeling that inbound links (that mimic academic citation) are not the appropriate "measure-of-goodness" to describe the effects and nature of the greater blogosphere (or blogiverse, if you prefer). What has always bothered me about this approach is precisely that it manifests the McLuhan observation that the first use of any new medium is to imitate the old (obsolesced) medium - in this case, the obsolesced structuring dominance of literacy. "Old media in new baubles" often goes on for some time before the true effects of the new are generally perceptible.

Among the effects of blogs that I am observing are "amplification of voice," "sustainability of ideas and issues," "locality of influence." I'm not a "quant," so I cannot propose the best metrics for these ideas. I just suspect that a different metric would show different patterns of influence - not "winning," since that, too, is an obsolesced form, inappropriate for a Ubiquitously Connected and Pervasively Proximate (UCaPP) world.

Very well organized site. I particularly liked the resources section.
Will use it to plan my next trip to NWT. See you soon.

I've blogged about the Technorati beta feature here. (Executive summary: what's 'welcome' about it?)

I see. I should not have put you on the spot like that. Sorry. It's The Best...and also some Bizarre Blogs (like Home Depot Bet Blog, Dracula Blogged, etc.)...of the Blogosphere. I gotta work on the title, and how I promote it.

Like Tom Peters says, we have to make more mistakes to get more success. Loose paraphrase.

I'm interested in how users perceive the little corner of the blogosphere they circulate in.

Many marketing and tech bloggers might be shocked at the toilet of MySpace, for example.

No problem, Steven. It was nice to be asked.

ESther Dyson says "Always make new mistakes."

Mark and Steven, I agree that the number of links in is not only a crude measure, it doesn't give a full picture. Plus, we're not even sure what they indicate. For example, "sentiment analysis" would tell us if the links are love letters or hate mail...but sentiment analysis is really really hard to do accurately. Then there are the other parameters that Mark entices us with. But, in a decentralized environment, it's hard to find other stuff to measure. We need more cleverness!