Blogger.Com fallout
Dave Winer's BloggerCon event last weekend at Harvard Law School will make it into the blog-history books as a mnor Woodstock, a gathering of the tribes in self celebration. Webcasts. Essays.
Oliver Willis writes:
- Blogs are great. They're wonderful, and they will Change Things. But we need to step back outside of the blog-to-blog echo chamber and look at how important this movement really is.
What seems to have happened is that the fundraising success of the Howard Dean campaign has become the blog equivalent of the Netscape IPO. That public offering opened the floodgates to thousands of unprofitable companies and created the stock market bubble that was great for some, but probably set the web industry back a few years after people realized it was not The Answer to all their problems. That cycle appears to be happening with blogs now. During the BloggerCon conference it would be easy to go home thinking that any problem of note in the world could be remedied by a simple addition of "blog" to it.
I'm not ready to drink the Kool-Aid just yet.
During one of the Saturday sessions a member of the audience referred to the assembled crowd as "utopia". Now, yes, I loved the blog camaraderie but quite frankly I don't want to be the only black person in utopia. I was the only black person in that room, and was one of a few minorities. I'm not whining about that, but simply stating the fact that a technology that is mostly the pursuit of upper middle class white males does diddly to change the real world. I'm a geek through-and-thorough but when I hear tooth gnashing about issues like copyright as if they were the most important issue in the world - it tells me that the blog world is somewhat out of touch.
Again, it is quite similar to the web bubble. For a while when you were inside the industry (as I was) it would be easy to think: everybody is doing this. When the truth of the matter is that they weren't and they aren't. The vast majority of Americans are not online, and even those that are online only a small portion of them are reading blogs, and an even smaller amount are reading politically oriented blogs. That small percentage does tend to be quite influential (particularly if they're a part of the media) but it is our duty as bloggers to understand that we aren't exactly changing the world yet.
That came out in the campaign bloggers panel where people like Dave Winer hammered the candidates for not plugging the money they raised online back into the web. What we are forgetting is that the web has yet to elect anyone. The reason we have campaigns are that candidates meet and greet the people they want to vote for them, and those they can't meet they "see" in tv ads. The overwhelming majority of Americans will pick their next president between two men they see on television and not someone they saw on the web much less a blog. We have to keep perspective.
Blogs are transformative tools, they're doing amazing things and they are enabling wonderful advances. On a personal level, if it weren't for blogs I wouldn't have improved as a writer (debatable, I guess) and there is certainly no way little old me would have made it on the front page of the Boston Globe. That's great for me on a personal level, but it ain't changing the world.
Dave Winer writes of the Rule of Win-Win:
I started formulating a new rule, I call it The Rule of Win-Win, after listening to Chris Lydon's interview with David Weinberger. I realized that he and I share something important, we both believe in the power of links. And it's not just a philosophy of writing for the Web, it's also a philosophy of business and human relations. And it's elusive and hard to describe. And there are lots of people who don't subscribe to the rule. People who take but don't reciprocate. Somehow, intuitively, this is unweblike. Somehow David and myself have agreed to something, unknowingly, that not everyone else has agreed to. What we have agreed to, I think, is what I'm going to try to explain in this essay.
The Rule of Win-Win says that by choosing to participate in the Web, I can promote my own interests, but I must acknowledge the existence of others and their interests. I don't sacrifice the truth in furthering my cause. In fact, if you accept the Rule of Win-Win, the truth is your first cause, it comes before all others.
In a sense, if you belong to the Win-Win club, you're a sales rep for my stock. When I meet with someone whose feed I want, you get it too. So when I win, you win. When my stock goes up, so does yours. Our interests are aligned.
The purpose of the rule is to create trust and then build on it. I first wrote about this in Que Sera Sera, in 1996: "Nothing will be announced unless it can be shown that someone else will win because of what you're doing. How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others' creativity.
On The Rule of Links, Dave writes:
- The New York Times, always controversial, says it's their policy is not to link, that their pub is self-contained and complete. This is total bullshit. While I love the Times, and have been reading it my whole life, I know that they're crazy over there. Can't fool me.
I wonder if this will become a trend for community building: attendees were invited to post their name, website, institution, and RSS feed, and most of them did. Talk about networking possibilities! Wow!
Blogroll for BloggerCon
Last update: 10/9/2003; 12:14:15 PM Eastern.
Huh. List truncated by Movable Type. I didn't realize entries have a built-in limit on how much text you can stuff into them. Posted by Jay Cross at October 9, 2003 09:50 AM | TrackBack Comments
Continued... Not to be snarky - because I'm sure it was a great event - but this was more 'Userland Con' or 'Berkman Con' than it was 'Blogger Com'. There was a significant skew in the selection of speakers. Check the education panel - is this the panel you would assemble on the topic? Now again, I'm sure it was a great event... but a new Woodstock? No. Too many people were left out. Posted by: Stephen Downes at October 12, 2003 06:52 AM |
