Metablogging For Fun & Profit

I love travelling but hate it at the same time, can't stand the disruption. Go away 2 days, spend another 3 just catching up on the news and blogs you missed while you were away. Then there's the sorting out of all that verbiage in your head to make some kind of coherent synthesis of the whole, then there's the writing about it and trying to make it amusing and informative at the same time; but then there's also the self-referential metablogging pleasure of complaining about all this on your blog, so it's not all negative.

Anyway, I feel all caught up now, I've got ibuprofen for the horrible Sinterklaas gift of a virus (hot on the heels of the last one) that I've come back with and a whole pot of coffee, so on with the motley.

It's nice to see that for once it's Prizes for the Girls Week, what with Pam Spaulding of Pandagon & Pam's House Blend getting Monette-Horwitz Trust Award, for blogging in support of GLBT rights, Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise getting a front page exclusive in a NY paper, and both they, Bitch Phd. and Feministe being nominated as finalists for the 2006 Weblog Awards.

Remember we blogrolled you when....

Blogging awards bother me a lot though and not just because we never get any. Is it sour grapes? Well, other than the natural tendency of anybody to be sad to be left out of anything, no. It's not really an issue for us: Martin and I have been blogging for a long time a] because we've always been early-adopter types within our practical and financial constraints and b] because we're both deeply and loudly political. Awards never even came into it.

I think the online world is the last and best home of free speech between individuals of different nationalities and physical locations, which is still (at least for the moment) relatively unmoderated by completely commercial interests and unencumbered by state apparatus. Bringing careers and money into it sullies the discourse, if that doesn't sound too precious.

That's why we've never bothered trying to make ad revenue, welcome as any small addition to our income would be - how much does it actually cost to run a blog after all, especially a small scale one like this that's hosted, as so many (even high-traffic) blogs are, for nothing at Blogger? It's a privilege to be able to speak to the world at large like this and I'm very aware of just how many people don't have that opportunity. I certainly don't expect to be paid for it.

Because of that fund drives are another thing I'm very ambivalent about: I can see wanting to defray your expenses if you have a high traffic blog and not much of your own money, but expecting to make a living at what is little more than pontification on reporting or research that's already been done by others, well if you want to do that, go get a job on a paper or in a thinktank, if there are any left. Or ask for subscriptions. Be a business, if that's what you want, but recognise that, you are no longer a private citizen.

Blog awards seem to be a way of establishing a hierarchy: if you look at previous nominees the same names come up over and over again, yet there are over a million blogs out there. Even the Koufaxes fall into this trap as the pool from which nomionations are chosen seems very small. It's not the promoters of the awards' fault necessarily: rather it seems to be a tendency in the nominators to draw their nominations from the familiar and from friends.

Blog awards and the desire to be a paid, professional blogger are both symptomatic of what's happening in the larger US left blogosphere: it appears a self-chosen, vaguely alternative Establishment is being set up, though perhaps set up is the wrong expression - too organised, and it's much more amorphous than that. The process is more crystallisation than orgenisation, there's no grand conspiracy: but as this New Establishment's component bloggers and pundits become more popular and get more hits their internet real estate also becomes more attractive to volume advertisers; before you know it they're a full-fledged profit-making business enterprise, a very different beast than the original platform for personal opinion and discussion that their blog was.

So far this has only happened to a limited extent, but the right conditions are there and as the political winds shift more and more US liberal opinion-formers are likely to be co-opted by the media and corporate establishment in this way. It's that whole pissing from inside the tent thing.

People do have to eat so I'm not blaming anyone for wanting to support themselves or trying to do that by doing what they love, but if so they really should admit that they are a commercial enterprise and not just Joe Schmo from Wherever NJ. We can then treat what they say accordingly.

The other underlying danger is the lure of the in-group: circular linking, collective ego-stroking, the feeling you are part of a charmed circle whose opinions count. Lesser mortals can bugger off.

The recent backlash against Firedoglake was heartening because it shows that many liberal bloggers recognise the danger of that and are willing to self-police, but there's still a lot of other self-congratulatory, 'aren't we clever' commenting communities at any number of liberal blogs.

Rival camps are also forming over who has most influence in the Democratic party and this has become more intense since the Dems sweep at the Congressional elections. Political careers are being built and new connections made. Just go take a look at Kos: I haven't contributed there for years, not since it became a stew of Democratic infighting, backstabbing and triangulation, making Markos' fortuine in the process.

I don't know, is it something about unresolved high-school popularity issues that leads to this forming of cliques? Is it that there's an innate tendency in US society to want to form exclusionary groups and chains of influence whatever the venue? And why is there always money at the bottom of it? Sociology to the white courtesy phone please...

Now see, If I had any sense I could probably work this whole thing up into a Phd. research topic and get a nice grant for it. And then maybe some punditry on blogging , or something. Hmmm. I'd be an expert then and get all the good gigs... which is exactly how a developing establishment feeds its own growth and real democracy gets excluded from the blogosphere.

I can't help thinking that this very process is exactly how we got the spoiled, insular, know-nothing self-interested US mass media we have today, so to see a similar nascent inside-the beltway mentality developing in the blogosphere is really quite disappointing.

On the other hand, when bloggers like Pam and Lindsay get recognised it's very satisfying because so far outspoken progressive women's voices have been lost in the conversation.

Although I do disapprove of the way this new US progressive political matrix is developing - meet the new K Street, same as the old K Street - at least because of their continued hard work there are some feminist voices actually being heard in the new political reality.

Read more: Internet, Blogs, Blogging, Metablogging, Liberal Blogosphere, Weblog Awards, New Establishment, Feminism

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Posted 12:59 PM by Republic of Palau

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