Where your author spends way too much time blogging about blogging, especially when most of it is just taking J-Dawg’s bait.
Chances are that my blogging credentials will be revoked if I don’t join the fray and take a moment to respond to the “big announcement” — the resignation of Mr. Calacanis on Friday and his follow-up about the State of the Blogosphere expressed in his first email list blast today:
…while blogging is clearly booming, there has been a deep qualitative change in the nature of the ‘sphere. There are so many folks involved in blogging to today, and it’s moving at a much quicker pace thanks to “social accelerants” like TechMeme, digg, Friendfeed and Twitter. Folks are so desperate to be heard–and we all want to be heard that’s why we blog–that the effort put into being heard has eclipsed the actual
hearing.Bloggers spend more time digging, tweeting, and SEOing their posts than they do on the posts themselves. In the early days of blogging Peter Rojas, who was my blog professor, told me what was required to win at blogging: “show up every day.” In 2003 and 2004 that was the case. Today? What’s required is a team of social marketers to get your message out there, and a second one to manage the fall-out from whatever you’ve said.
Now, I’m not going to waste time reacting in-depth to the blogosphere’s immediate reaction — which seems to be about 40% rational (Jason’s playing everyone yet again/this means nothing) and 60% utterly irrational (regurgitation of the “why do there have to be popular kids?” death of the A-list meme — haven’t we been over this before?). And I’m going to keep my reaction to the reaction light — not just b/c it’s so disasterously ubermeta that it might raise my NMDB ranking to astronomical levels, or the fact that I played a role in helping to identify and quantify several iterations of the very list that everybody’s lining up to torch yet again (uh oh, there goes that NMDB score). It doesn’t surprise me that so many are buying the “this changes everything” idea — in today’s publicist-crafted media world, where most big announcements can be seen days or weeks out, there’s always a few opportunists who respond to genuinely unforeseen news with that sort of doomsdayish “this changes everything” response. It’s a good way to sound like you’re able to quickly read the tea leaves and grasp news you didn’t get a head start on while insulating yourself from any actual risk. After all, if you make a big, bold prediction before the dust settles, who’s actually going to remember and call you on that prediction 6 months or a year out? The irony is, it’s this very sort of linkbaiting that Jason calls out as a reason for his departure from the blogosphere, and in the wake of that announcement, that’s the takeaway I see dominating the response conversation. I’m sure J-Dawg appreciates all of you doing your part to feed his perceived prescience.
Rather than indulge in any of that, I simply want to reflect on some feelings I found myself harboring as I listened to the the tone of Calacanis’ announcement, as opposed to the dramatically-scripted content. In particular, I’m going to try and relate his own misty-eyed, Jordan-wannabe tenor back to my own recent attempts to take a quick break from blogging, right as my relocated blog had started to get some traction.
I frame my response to Jason with two items — one that preceded Jason’s announcement, and one that I don’t think had anything to do with Jason’s announcement directly, but is almost sure to get churned into the State of the Blogosphere threads that J-Cal inspired:
1.) A post by Sarah Lacy a few weeks back (which she linked in her own reaction to Calacanis’ “press conference”), where she rightly called out that for a driven, goal-oriented person, blogging can quickly turn into an all-or-not proposition. Even if you’re not putting new stuff out on a daily basis, it’s hard to flip the idea generation & refinement switch off, and it’s even harder to slow down. It’s 100mph or park. And for the past couple weeks, as I hunkered down to focus on several crucial professional milestones, the only option was to reluctantly pull into the garage.
2.) The commenter culture meme, which Rex referenced yesterday. From New York Magazine’s Brownstoner piece last month to Lev Grossman’s recent bit on commenter rage in Time (and let’s not forget Jakob Lodwick’s farewell), the age-old “Usenet trolls message board posters commenters people on the Internet are assholes” meme seems to be coming around yet again (makes me wistful for “Mambo No. 5″ and The Matrix)
So all of this has led me to some quick thoughts on creative cycles, media consumption, and how it especially affects the independent content producer, for whatever they may be worth:
- Everyone goes through creative cycles — you can’t keep going non-stop making stuff that people actually want to read/watch/listen to/laugh at/gossip about. Eventually, you’ll get boring, repetitive, tired, and/or wind up in rehab. And while everyone is different, chances are you need more than a day off here or there to stay sharp long-term. Musicians routinely take weeks off, movie stars and filmmakers take weeks or months off between projects (well, everyone except Will Ferrell), even the daily TV stars — talk show hosts, news people, etc. — squeeze in a week off regularly, and typically take a longer 2-week hiatus at some point annually. It only makes sense that indie content producers should also take time off — especially when you consider the many hats that so many of us have to wear, from concepting to production through post/editing/distribution, not to mention infrastructure like programming a site or providing the IT service of getting the computer working. Add in the rigors of dealing with the comment fray, and you’ve got to find some time to escape — even if it does cost your PageRank or a few points off your comScore ratings.
Which leads me to my next two points, about the dual-edged promise and challenge of today’s media world:
- Our media consumption habits have gotten more and more demanding, thanks to on-demand sources like TiVo and DVRs, VOD/downloads/iTunes Music Store, next-day shipping and feedreaders that may or may not be contributing to everyone’s increasingly ADD states-of-being. When the opportunity cost of checking in with a favorite source of news/entertainment is potentially missing thousands of other NEW stories out there, the danger of forfeiting your spot in the media landscape only to find it squatted upon by Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader or whatever new gossip or tech blog launched that week are very real indeed.
- Major media has two main advantages in this landscape — $$$ and massive backlogs of content. They can fill any hiatus’s void with all sorts of other monetizable content from their libraries, then pour huge chunks of change into making sure everyone knows that story or actor you loved is back to reclaim their place in your world. If you want to beat them, but still want to take a break from time to time, you’ve either got to scale to hire people to fill your shoes while you’re gone, or find innovative ways to make sure your audience does come back, and doesn’t have their eyeballs ransacked by a deep-pocketed competitor who can shout louder than you.
So what does all of this mean? For starters, as independent content producers, we need our audiences to get equipped with better filters (which is, imho, a big reason people are getting SO excited about FriendFeed — its potential to take unified aggregation of our content production and consumption and (hopefully) turn it into something useful). Without some improved filters, Jason may have prove to be right — this may all permanently devolve into a shouting match, where the linkbaiters and people who can churn out the most content (regardless of how devoid of original thought/ideas it may be) are going to come out on top. But the more we can continue to help our audiences to separate the wheat from the proverbial chaff (and the burden shouldn’t just be on software developers to build better content filtering/organizational tools — we as producers have to chip in and do our part, with things like tagging, SEO, pinging, story submission, et al), the better chance that quality has to win out over quantity and volume.
As far as the Calacanis news goes, I just hope the citizens of JasonNation can make a distinction between what Jason is doing — continuing as an independent content producer, just (a) slowing the volume of content creation, (b) shifting the conversation from two-way to one-way, and most importantly to me, (c) limiting the ways we can access the content he creates.
And finally, if this week did nothing else for us, it taught us a valuable lesson. As Calacanis exited the building, Asshole Balk returned. Circle of life people. Circle of f-ing life.
Drawing credit: gapingvoid.com (duh)
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