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An Epic in Parallel Form

Best Entries, Computers & Internet, Culture, Weblogs / Mark / December 5, 2004

Tyler Cowen has an interesting post on the scholarly content of blogging in which he speculates as to how blogging and academic scholarship fit together. In so doing he makes some general observations about blogging:

Blogging is a fundamentally new medium, akin to an epic in serial form, but combining the functions of editor and author. Who doesn’t dream of writing an epic?

Don’t focus on the single post. Rather a good blog provides you a whole vision of what a field is about, what the interesting questions are, and how you might answer them. It is also a new window onto a mind. And by packaging intellectual content with some personality, bloggers appeal to the biological instincts of blog readers. Be as intellectual as you want, you still are programmed to find people more memorable than ideas.

It’s an interesting perspective. Many blogs are general in subject, but some of the ones that really stand out have some sort of narrative (for lack of a better term) that you can follow from post to post. As Cowen puts it, an “epic in serial form.” The suggestion that reading a single blog many times is more rewarding than reading the best posts from many different blogs is interesting. But while a single blog may give you a broad view of what a field is about, it can also be rewarding to aggregate the specific views of a wide variety of individuals, even biased and partisan individuals. As Cowen mentions, the blogosphere as a whole is the relevant unit of analysis. Even if each individual view is unimpressive on its own, that may not be the case when taken collectively. In a sense, while each individual is writing a flawed epic in serial form, they are all contributing to an epic in parallel form.

Which brings up another interesting aspect of blogs. When the blogosphere tackles a subject, it produces a diverse set of opinions and perspectives, all published independently by a network of analysts who are all doing work in parallel. The problem here is that the decentralized nature of the blogosphere makes aggregation difficult. Determining a group as large and diverse as the blogosphere’s “answer” based on all of the disparate information they have produced is incredibly difficult, especially when the majority of data represents opinions of various analysts. A deficiency in aggregation is part of where groupthink comes from, but some groups are able to harness their disparity into something productive. The many are smarter than the few, but only if the many are able to aggregate their data properly.

In theory, blogs represent a self-organizing system that has the potential to evolve and display emergent properties (a sort of human hive mind). In practice, it’s a little more difficult to say. I think it’s clear that the spontaneous appearance of collective thought, as implemented through blogs or other communication systems, is happening frequently on the internet. However, each occurrence is isolated and only represents an incremental gain in productivity. In other words, a system will sometimes self-organize in order to analyze a problem and produce an enormous amount of data which is then aggregated into a shared vision (a vision which is much more sophisticated than anything that one individual could come up with), but the structure that appears in that case will disappear as the issue dies down. The incredible increase in analytic power is not a permanent stair step, nor is it ubiquitous. Indeed, it can also be hard to recognize the signal in a great sea of noise.

Of course, such systems are constantly and spontaneously self-organizing; themselves tackling problems in parallel. Some systems will compete with others, some systems will organize around trivial issues, some systems won’t be nearly as effective as others. Because of this, it might be that we don’t even recognize when a system really transcends its perceived limitations. Of course, such systems are not limited to blogs. In fact they are quite common, and they appear in lots of different types of systems. Business markets are, in part, self-organizing, with emergent properties like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. Open Source software is another example of a self-organizing system.

Interestingly enough, this subject ties in nicely with a series of posts I’ve been working on regarding the properties of Reflexive documentaries, polarized debates, computer security, and national security. One of the general ideas discussed in those posts is that an argument achieves a higher degree of objectivity by embracing and acknowledging its own biases and agenda. Ironically, in acknowledging one’s own subjectivity, one becomes more objective and reliable. This applies on an individual basis, but becomes much more powerful when it is part of an emergent system of analysis as discussed above. Blogs are excellent at this sort of thing precisely because they are made up of independent parts that make no pretense at objectivity. It’s not that any one blog or post is particularly reliable in itself, it’s that blogs collectively are more objective and reliable than any one analyst (a journalist, for instance), despite the fact that many blogs are mediocre at best. The news media represents a competing system (the journalist being the media’s equivalent of the blogger), one that is much more rigid and unyielding. The interplay between blogs and the media is fascinating, and you can see each medium evolving in response to the other (the degree to which this is occurring is naturally up for debate). You might even be able to make the argument that blogs are, themselves, emergent properties of the mainstream media.

Personally, I don’t think I have that exact sort of narrative going here, though I do believe I’ve developed certain thematic consistencies in terms of the subjects I cover here. I’m certainly no expert and I don’t post nearly often enough to establish the sort of narrative that Cowen is talking about, but I do think a reader would benefit from reading multiple posts. I try to make up for my low posting frequency by writing longer, more detailed posts, often referencing older posts on similar subjects. However, I get the feeling that if I were to break up my posts into smaller, more digestible pieces, the overall time it would take to read and produce the same material would be significantly longer. Of course, my content is rarely scholarly in nature, and my subject matter varies from week to week as well, but I found this interesting to think about nonetheless.

I think I tend to be more of an aggregator than anything else, which is interesting because I’ve never thought about what I do in those terms. It’s also somewhat challenging, as one of my weaknesses is being timely with information. Plus aggregation appears to be one of the more tricky aspects of a system such as the ones discussed above, and with respect to blogs, it is something which definitely needs some work…

Update 12.13.04: I wrote some more on the subject. I aslo made a minor edit to this entry, moving one paragraph lower down. No content has actually changed, but the new order flows better.

Arranging Interests in Parallel

Best Entries, Culture, Neal Stephenson, Weblogs / Mark / November 11, 2004

I have noticed a tendency on my part to, on occasion, quote a piece of fiction, and then comment on some wisdom or truth contained therein. This sort of thing is typically frowned upon in rigorous debate as fiction is, by definition, contrived and thus referencing it in a serious argument is rightly seen as undesirable. Fortunately for me, this blog, though often taking a serious tone, is ultimately an exercise in thinking for myself. The point is to have fun. This is why I will sometimes quote fiction to make a point, and it’s also why I enjoy questionable exercises like speculating about historical figures. As I mentioned in a post on Benjamin Franklin, such exercises usually end up saying more about me and my assumptions than anything else. But it’s my blog, so that is more or less appropriate.

Astute readers must at this point be expecting to recieve a citation from a piece of fiction, followed by an application of the relevant concepts to some ends. And they would be correct.

Early on in Neal Stephenson’s novel The System of the World, Daniel Waterhouse reflects on what is required of someone in his position:

He was at an age where it was never possible ot pursue one errand at a time. He must do many at once. He guessed that people who had lived right and arranged things properly must have it all rigged so that all of their quests ran in parallel, and reinforced and supported one another just so. They gained reputations as conjurors. Others found their errands running at cross purposes and were never able to do anything; they ended up seeming mad, or else percieived the futility of what they were doing and gave up, or turned to drink.

Naturally, I believe there is some truth to this. In fact, the life of Benjamin Franklin, a historical figure from approximately the same time period as Dr. Waterhouse, provides us with a more tangible reference point.

Franklin was known to mix private interests with public ones, and to leverage both to further his business interests. The consummate example of Franklin’s proclivities was the Junto, a club of young workingmen formed by Franklin in the fall of 1727. The Junto was a small club composed of enterprising tradesman and artisans who discussed issues of the day and also endeavored to form a vehicle for the furtherance of their own careers. The enterprise was typical of Franklin, who was always eager to form associations for mutual benefit, and who aligned his interests so they ran in parallel, reinforcing and supporting one another.

A more specific example of Franklin’s knack for aligning interests is when he produced the first recorded abortion debate in America. At the time, Franklin was running a print shop in Philadelphia. His main competitor, Andrew Bradford, published the town’s only newspaper. The paper was meager, but very profitable in both moneys and prestige (which led him to be more respected by merchants and politicians, and thus more likely to get printing jobs), and Franklin decided to launch a competing newspaper. Unfortunately, another rival printer, Samuel Keimer, caught wind of Franklin’s plan and immediately launched a hastily assembled newspaper of his own. Franklin, realizing that it would be difficult to launch a third paper right away, vowed to crush Keimer:

In a comptetitive bank shot, Franklin decided to write a series of anonymous letters and essays, along the lines of the Silence Dogood pieces of his youth, for Bradford’s [American Weekly Mercury] to draw attention away from Keimer’s new paper. The goal was to enliven, at least until Keimer was beaten, Bradford’s dull paper, which in its ten years had never puplished any such features.

The first two pieces were attacks on poor Keimer, who was serializing entries from an encyclopedia. His intial installment included, innocently enough, an entry on abortion. Franklin pounced. Using the pen names “Martha Careful” and “Celia Shortface,” he wrote letters to Bradford’s paper feigning shock and indignation at Keimer’s offense. As Miss Careful threatened, “If he proceeds farther to expose the secrets of our sex in that audacious manner [women would] run the hazard of taking him by the beard in the next place we meet him.” Thus Franklin manufactured the first recorded abortion debate in America, not because he had any strong feelings on the issue, but because he knew it would sell newspapers. [This is an exerpt from the recent biography Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson]

Franklin’s many actions of the time certainly weren’t running at cross purposes, and he did manage to align his interests in parallel. He truly was a master, and we’ll be hearing more about him on this blog soon.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about this subject before either. In a previous post, On the Overloading of Information, I noted one of the main reasons why blogging continues to be an enjoyable activity for me, despite changing interests and desires:

I am often overwhelmed by a desire to consume various things – books, movies, music, etc… The subject of such things is also varied and, as such, often don’t mix very well. That said, the only thing I have really found that works is to align those subjects that do mix in such a way that they overlap. This is perhaps the only reason blogging has stayed on my plate for so long: since the medium is so free-form and since I have absolute control over what I write here and when I write it, it is easy to align my interests in such a way that they overlap with my blog (i.e. I write about what interests me at the time).

One way you can tell that my interests have shifted over the years is that the format and content of my writing here has also changed. I am once again reminded of Neal Stephenson’s original minimalist homepage in which he speaks of his ongoing struggle against what Linda Stone termed as “continuous partial attention,” as that curious feature of modern life only makes the necessity of aligning interests in parallel that much more important.

Aligning blogging with my other core interests, such as reading fiction, is one of the reasons I frequently quote fiction, even in reference to a serious topic. Yes, such a practice is frowned upon, but blogging is a hobby, the idea of which is to have fun. Indeed, Glenn Reynolds, progenitor of one of the most popular blogging sites around, also claims to blog for fun, and interestingly enough, he has quoted fiction in support of his own serious interests as well (more than once). One other interesting observation is that all references to fiction in this post, including even Reynolds’ references, are from Neal Stephenson’s novels. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what significance, if any, that holds.

MT Success!

Weblogs / Mark / October 31, 2004

After a week of Movable Type installation and upgradation woes, I hath finally vanquished mine enemy and emerged victorious. My tale is long and breathtakingly boring, so I shall not curse thou with the banal details of my struggle without warning. But for posterity, and because some people may have the same problem as me, I shall recount my tale of woe and weary, as well as how my foul enemy was finally defeated.

So las week I embarked on a quest to upgrade Movable Type to the new version. I also figured it would be a good idea to upgrade my database from the once preferred Berkeley db to MySQL. SixApart, the developers of MT, were thoughtful enough to provide a utility (mt-db2sql.cgi) that loads the data from Berkely db to MySQL, say thankya. However, after backing up all my data and following all necessary steps, I ran the script and was baffled by the response. “MySQL server has gone away,” it said. Repeated attempts were to no avail. A helpful poster at the MT Support Forums found the error in the MySQL documentation. Said documentation seemed to indicate that this was a server timeout problem. I opened a support ticket with my host and they confirmed that “We do have some limits in place that restrict the amount of time queries can run for, or how much memory they

may consume.”

At this point I almost despaired. This was about 3 days after the initial attempt, and my lack of progress was depressing. But, in my desperation, I set the script up to run again, and asked my host to run it for me, figuring that they would be able to run it as an admin (or otherwise get around the query limits on the server). My host graciously agreed, and ran the script for me. Checking the database with PHPMyAdmin, I could see that all the pertinent data was in the appropriate location. Victory is mine! Or so I thought.

Overjoyed at finally completing the data load, I anxiously logged in to MT. Alas, it was not to be. I logged in, and saw that neither of my blogs was appearing. What foul devilry was this? I could see my profile information and the Activity Log, but I could not view (and thus, I could not edit) either blog. Even more frustrating, the MT System Stats box showed “Total Blogs: 2.” This meant that MT was getting data from MySQL, but that not all of it was showing up.

Again, I almost despaired. Subsequent posts to the MT Support Forum did not produce any results. For three days, I languished in agony, and in moments of weakness, I debated switching back to Berkeley db. But this morn, I decided to give the MT Support Forums one last check, and though no one had responeded to my pleading posts, I did find one post in another forum on another subject, which proved to be most helpful.

In short, that post contained links to a few useful configuration utilities, including the glorious MT-Medic. After downloading, configuring, and installing MT-Medic, I saw that my Username in MT no longer had the correct permissions set. For whatever reason, mt-db2sql.cgi did not transfer over said permissions when it ran, and thus my Username did not have permission to see my blogs. MT-Medic allowed me to fix this problem quickly and easily. (I must also thank the Multiple Blog Suite for help in diagnosing the problem).

With that demon slain, I was able to log in to MT and write this entry. Success was finally mine. I can finally post again, and upgrade MT-Blacklist so as to prevent massive comment spamming (apparently, spammers found a way to submit comments even during the period of limbo). So there you have it. If you’re still reading this and wondering what the hell I’m blathering about, please accept my apologies, but I figured this post could be a help to others who will no doubt suffer from this problem in the future.

Update: Well then, it seems my celebrating was a bit premature. It turns out that none of my templates made the switch, and so when I tried to publish this entry it didn’t show up. So I switched back to Berkeley db, copy/pasted all of the templates into files, which I then imported into the MySQL version of MT, at which point I was able to publish this. Yes, so another helpful hint: Use the link this template to a file feature. Again, apologies to those who have no idea what I’m talking about…

Again Update: It seems that in the conversion process, all of my entries lost their category associations. Odd. So the category archives might be acting funny until I can go back and recategorize everything. Given MT 3.x’s new subcategory feature, this might not be a horrible thing, but still, another thing to be aware of…

MT Upgrade

1 Comment / Weblogs / Mark / October 24, 2004

I’m in the process of doing some upgrades and maintenance to the site. I’ve just upgraded to Movable Type 3.121, which went pretty well. Some nice new functionality, and I’m glad it was available in a free version for people like me who only have one weblog with one author and don’t post all that often.

Next up is converting from Berkeley DB to MySQL. I actually tried this before I upgraded, but it keeps crapping out on me (I get this error, which I’m sure is a host thing, but they have yet to get back to me). Hopefully I’ll get that resolved in the next few days, as I’m told that MySQL is much better in terms of performance.

All of which is to say that you might experience some wierdness in comments and whatnot (wierdness as in not working, not people like myself making strange comments). Other site maintenance is afoot as well (believe it or not, this site is more than just a weblog), so keep an eye out…

Update 10.26.04: Still no luck with converting to MySQL. I may have to stick with Berkeley for the time being. Anyway, comments were down for a good portion of the day today, and may be going down again soon. Also, for now, comments need to be approved before they show up. Sorry for any inconvenience.

A Reflexive Media

1 Comment / Best Entries, Culture, Movies, Politics, Weblogs / Mark / September 15, 2004

“To write or to speak is almost inevitably to lie a little. It is an attempt to clothe an intangible in a tangible form; to compress an immeasurable into a mold. And in the act of compression, how the Truth is mangled and torn!”

– Anne Murrow Lindbergh

There are many types of documentary films. The most common form of documentary is referred to as Direct Address (aka Voice of God). In such a documentary, the viewer is directly acknowledged, usually through narration and voice-overs. There is very little ambiguity and it is pretty obvious how you’re expected to interpret these types of films. Many television and news programs use this style, to varying degrees of success. Ken Burns’ infamous Civil War and Baseball series use this format eloquently, but most traditional propaganda films also fall into this category (a small caveat: most films are hybrids, rarely falling exclusively into one category). Such films give the illusion of being an invisible witness to certain events and are thus very persuasive and powerful.

The problem with Direct Address documentaries is that they grew out of a belief that Truth is knowable through objective facts. In a recent sermon he posted on the web, Donald Sensing spoke of the difference between facts and the Truth:

Truth and fact are not the same thing. We need only observe the presidential race to discern that. John Kerry and allies say that the results of America’s war against Iraq is mostly a failure while George Bush and allies say they are mostly success. Both sides have the same facts, but both arrive at a different “truth.”

People rarely fight over facts. What they argue about is what the facts mean, what is the Truth the facts indicate.

I’m not sure Sensing chose the best example here, but the concept itself is sound. Any documentary is biased in the Truth that it presents, even if the facts are undisputed. In a sense objectivity is impossible, which is why documentary scholar Bill Nichols admires films which seek to contextualize themselves, exposing their limitations and biases to the audience.

Reflexive Documentaries use many devices to acknowledge the filmmaker’s presence, perspective, and selectivity in constructing the film. It is thought that films like this are much more honest about their subjectivity, and thus provide a much greater service to the audience.

An excellent example of a Reflexive documentary is Errol Morris’ brilliant film, The Thin Blue Line. The film examines the “truth” around the murder of a Dallas policeman. The use of colored lighting throughout the film eventually correlates with who is innocent or guilty, and Morris is also quite manipulative through his use of editing – deconstructing and reconstructing the case to demonstrate just how problematic finding the truth can be. His use of framing calls attention to itself, daring the audience to question the intents of the filmmakers. The use of interviews in conjunction with editing is carefully structured to demonstrate the subjectivity of the film and its subjects. As you watch the movie, it becomes quite clear that Morris is toying with you, the viewer, and that he wants you to be critical of the “truth” he is presenting.

Ironically, a documentary becomes more objective when it acknowledges its own biases and agenda. In other words, a documentary becomes more objective when it admits its own subjectivity. There are many other forms of documentary not covered here (i.e. direct cinema/cinema verité, interview-based, performative, mock-documentaries, etc… most of which mesh together as they did in Morris’ Blue Line to form a hybrid).

In Bill Nichols’ seminal essay, Voice of Documentary (Can’t seem to find a version online), he says:

“Documentary filmmakers have a responsibility not to be objective. Objectivity is a concept borrowed from the natural sciences and from journalism, with little place in the social sciences or documentary film.”

I always found it funny that Nichols equates the natural sciences with journalism, as it seems to me that modern journalism is much more like a documentary than a natural science. As such, I think the lessons of Reflexive documentaries (and its counterparts) should apply to the realm of journalism.

The media emphatically does not acknowledge their biases. By bias, I don’t mean anything as short-sighted as liberal or conservative media bias, I mean structural bias of which political orientation is but a small part (that link contains an excellent essay on the nature of media bias, one that I find presents a more complete picture and is much more useful than the tired old ideological bias we always hear so much about*). Such subjectivity does exist in journalism, yet the media stubbornly persists in their firm belief that they are presenting the objective truth.

The recent CBS scandal, consisting of a story bolstered by what appear to be obviously forged documents, provides us with an immediate example. Terry Teachout makes this observation regarding how few prominent people are willing to admit that they are wrong:

I was thinking today about how so few public figures are willing to admit (for attribution, anyway) that they’ve done something wrong, no matter how minor. But I wasn’t thinking of politicians, or even of Dan Rather. A half-remembered quote had flashed unexpectedly through my mind, and thirty seconds’ worth of Web surfing produced this paragraph from an editorial in a magazine called World War II:

Soon after he had completed his epic 140-mile march with his staff from Wuntho, Burma, to safety in India, an unhappy Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell was asked by a reporter to explain the performance of Allied armies in Burma and give his impressions of the recently concluded campaign. Never one to mince words, the peppery general responded: “I claim we took a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, and go back and retake it.”

Stilwell spoke those words sixty-two years ago. When was the last time that such candor was heard in like circumstances? What would happen today if similar words were spoken by some equally well-known person who’d stepped in it up to his eyebrows?

As he points out later in his post, I don’t think we’re going to be seeing such admissions any time soon. Again, CBS provides a good example. Rather than admit the possibility that they may be wrong, their response to the criticisms of their sources has been vague, dismissive, and entirely reliant on their reputation as a trustworthy staple of journalism. They have not yet comprehensively responded to any of the numerous questions about the documents; questions which range from “conflicting military terminology to different word-processing techniques”. It appears their strategy is to escape the kill zone by focusing on the “truth” of their story, that Bush’s service in the Air National Guard was less than satisfactory. They won’t admit that the documents are forgeries, and by focusing on the arguably important story, they seek to distract the issue away from their any discussion of their own wrongdoing – in effect claiming that the documents aren’t important because the story is “true” anyway.

Should they admit they were wrong? Of course they should, but they probably won’t. If they won’t, it will not be because they think the story is right, and not because they think the documents are genuine. They won’t admit wrongdoing and they won’t correct their methodologies or policies because to do so would be to acknowledge to the public that they are less than just an objective purveyor of truth.

Yet I would argue that they should do so, that it is their duty to do so just as it is the documentarian’s responsibility to acknowledge their limitations and agenda to their audience.

It is also interesting to note that weblogs contrast the media by doing just that. Glenn Reynolds notes that the internet is a low-trust medium, which paradoxically indicates that it is more trustworthy than the media (because blogs and the like acknowledge their bias and agenda, admit when they’re wrong, and correct their mistakes):

The Internet, on the other hand, is a low-trust environment. Ironically, that probably makes it more trustworthy.

That’s because, while arguments from authority are hard on the Internet, substantiating arguments is easy, thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks. And, where things aren’t linkable, you can post actual images. You can spell out your thinking, and you can back it up with lots of facts, which people then (thanks to Google, et al.) find it easy to check. And the links mean that you can do that without cluttering up your narrative too much, usually, something that’s impossible on TV and nearly so in a newspaper.

(This is actually a lot like the world lawyers live in — nobody trusts us enough to take our word for, well, much of anything, so we back things up with lots of footnotes, citations, and exhibits. Legal citation systems are even like a primitive form of hypertext, really, one that’s been around for six or eight hundred years. But I digress — except that this perhaps explains why so many lawyers take naturally to blogging).

You can also refine your arguments, updating — and even abandoning them — in realtime as new facts or arguments appear. It’s part of the deal.

This also means admitting when you’re wrong. And that’s another difference. When you’re a blogger, you present ideas and arguments, and see how they do. You have a reputation, and it matters, but the reputation is for playing it straight with the facts you present, not necessarily the conclusions you reach.

The mainstream media as we know it is on the decline. They will no longer be able to get by on their brand or their reputations alone. The collective intelligence of the internet, combined with the natural reflexiveness of its environment, has already provided a challenge to the underpinnings of journalism. On the internet, the dominance of the media is constantly challenged by individuals who question the “truth” presented to them in the media. I do not think that blogs have the power to eclipse the media, but their influence is unmistakable. The only question that remains is if the media will rise to the challenge. If the way CBS has reacted is any indication, then, sadly, we still have a long way to go.

* Yes, I do realize the irony of posting this just after I posted about liberal and conservative tendencies in online debating, and I hinted at that with my “Update” in that post.

Thanks to Jay Manifold for the excellent Structural Bias of Journalism link.

Too Much Bardak

2 Comments / Weblogs / Mark / August 29, 2004

Last week I wrote a post about popular bloggers and how success can be a challenge. As if to prove my point, Steven Den Beste has quit blogging (for the time being, at least). It’s not a huge surprise, he’s been slowing down for a while, and he’s posted a few times about it. He used to have a bulletin board, but he took that down a while ago. He doesn’t have comments, nor does he allow trackbacks. The only thing left is email, and it appears that his inbox gets constantly filled with pedantic nitpicking. He once described it thusly:

Almost all of these letters were friendly and helpful. But the cumulative effect of them is like a piledriver… This morning, I started scanning through my mailbox and, for just a moment, considered taking the site down. I really do like receiving mail from readers, and I don’t really mind receiving critical mail. But when I receive 50 letters in 12 hours which all hop on the same exact point, then even if nearly all of them are friendly and helpful and supportive, the cumulative effect is ego-crushing. And for a couple of minutes, I found myself asking why I’m bothering with this at all. Why am I spending $200 per month and several hours per day, apparently only to give people someone to sneer at?

It was an unfair reaction on my part; I know full well that most of my readers don’t sneer at me.

He’s been trying for a while to cut down on annoying emails, to the point where he inserts little notes in his posts which mean “Don’t write letters!” For all his efforts, this apparently didn’t stop abuse; emails nitpicking minor details (missing the forest for the trees) still flood his inbox.

Last week, I quoted Commisar on why big bloggers don’t allow comments, etc… “Too much bardak,” he said. But Den Beste posted some examples of the email he gets, and it becomes clear that while he has to shift though his fair share of noise, there is a significant amount of signal that is worthy of attention. Too much, in fact, and I can imagine that would be overwhelming.

The only real solutions left to Den Beste are to stop blogging, or to stop allowing emails. Forbidding emails is probably unrealistic. I’d imagine he wants some sort of feedback, just not the backbreaking quantity he gets now. It’s not just that he doesn’t get good emails, it’s that he gets too many good emails as well. There’s no real way to separate duplicate comments or overly intensive requests from the rest, and that’s the real problem. I suppose if he did forbid emails, feedback could be garnered through people blogging their comments, but that still leaves something to be desired. From what I know, I think it could work, but it’s obviously not ideal. So for now he’s stopped blogging.

And as much as I enjoy his blog, I really can’t blame him for that. I can’t imagine getting that much feedback, and if I did, I’m sure I’d buckle under the pressure far sooner than Den Beste. I will miss his blogging though, and anxiously await his return… but I’m not holding my breath. Happy trails, Captain!

Spider Man and Blogging

Weblogs / Mark / August 22, 2004

Webslinger or Weblogger?: metaphilm details the surprising similarities between Spider Man 2 and bloggers:

It’s tough being a famous weblogger. Every time something happens, you feel obliged to post an entry. In fact, people expect it. At first it’s exciting, but it soon becomes overwhelming (and you’re not even getting paid for it). The next thing you know, you’re not performing at work, going out on dates, or getting on with your life. And to your surprise, you’ve become a target of criticism. All you’ve ever done is try to use your weblogging abilities to help humankind from the forces of corporate, political, and aesthetic evil. And what does humankind do? They turn on you. They take you for granted. They spam your commenting system.

… Eventually you realize that you have a choice to make. Either continue the demanding life of a weblogger or call it quits. You conclude, “I want a life of my own. I’m weblogging no more.”

A short and interesting read, and it actually does make a little sense. A blogger always wants to be read, but how many people really want a huge readership? Personally, I would like more traffic, but not to the point where I get hundreds of comments per entry. At that point I’d probably stop allowing comments, and if you look around at some of the most popular blogs, you’ll notice they don’t have comments or trackbacks enabled and sometimes even emailing them can be a challenge. There is a good reason popular bloggers like Glenn Reynolds don’t have these things enabled – as the Commisar puts it, “Too much bardak.”

The Commisar also seems to have a good handle on how build traffic for your blog. His basic theory is that if you’re running a small to medium blog, you should focus on getting attention from similar blogs. You don’t need to send links out to big bloggers hoping they’ll link you, because even if they do, you get a giant spike of visits, and then things return right back to normal. However, if you build up a friendship with lots of other smaller blogs, you’ll get more consistent traffic. You do this sort of thing by making thoughtful comments on their blogs, or linking to them, or maybe exchanging some emails. Personally, I always have a hard time doing that because I’m lazy and don’t want to read a lot of other blogs and spend time posting insightful comments. I have a hard enough time keeping up with my own blog, and yet to a great extent, the “comrades” I have developed in the blogosphere have come, to a great extent, from that very source. But I digress.

In the end, while I could stand a little more traffic, I’m just happy when an entry gets a modest amount of comments or a link from some other blog. I don’t think I’ll be getting famous any time soon, but still, too much traffic would seem a burden. The important thing is that I like what I’m doing here, and I do. And I’m certainly thankful for those who do take the time to read and comment here, because I don’t know that I would continue without them. It is a matter of balance, I guess…

Four Years of Kaedrin Blog

4 Comments / Weblogs / Mark / July 25, 2004

You read that right, it’s been a little over four years since I started this blog. Of course, it was a lot different back then (no, no, you don’t need to go back and check. I know the links are right there, but you really don’t need to look at what this blog was like back then. Trust me.) and I went through various periods of inactivity. The blog in it’s current form pretty much started a little over a year ago, when I resolved to post at least once a week, a schedule I’ve held to pretty well. I’ve also begun to do a little more in the way of original writing. I’m still very dependant on pull quotes, but I like to think I’ve made some progress.

One thing that has become apparent over the past year is that there appear to be a handful of themes that keep coming up (even excluding the “I like movies” theme). Unfortunately, now that I’m thinking about it, it is difficult to actually give a succinct name for these themes, though some specific posts seem to do a good job summarizing these things which interest me. This post on Error, Calibration, and Defiant Posturing encapsulates one of the themes of the blog. This post about tradeoffs has figured into a great number of posts over the past year. And so on.

Overall, it’s been a good four years, but there is always room for improvement. For various reasons, things have been slow around here lately. Hopefully it’ll be picking up a little in the near future. As always, comments, suggestions, breathless praise, bitter criticism and the like are welcome…

The Way of the Blog

2 Comments / Weblogs / Mark / April 11, 2004

One of the most frustrating things about blogging is that even when you’re really happy with what you’ve written, it eventually gets pushed off the main page to languish in the obscurity of the archives. Since I have certain recurring interests, I do occasionally link back to them myself, but I doubt people go perusing the archives and one can hardly blame them. This is the way of the blog; your best work gets buried in the archives.

Some bloggers have attempted to combat that by publishing lists of their best entries, so taking my cue from them, here is a list of my best entries (it’s also in the navigation to the right). I’m not done with it yet, but it’s a good start. Unfortunately, I doubt taking this step would really show tangible results. It is, after all, just another link in the navigation.

A while ago, I checked Jonathon Delacour’s blog and a picture at the top of his left-navigation caught my eye. It links back to one of his older posts (which I assume he likes or is otherwise proud of). In true internet fashion, I’d like to steal that idea and implement something like that here. You can see a preliminary version of this on my archive page (at the top of the right-navigation). Some entries are difficult to come up with images for, so it might be a while before this feature really gets going. Given the eye-catching nature of this feature though, I think it would be a lot more effective than just a list.

This is a work in progress, so expect some changes. If you have any favorite entries, feel free to post a comment or drop me an email and let me know (and thanks to those who’ve already chimed in!)