I judge the quality of a weblog by its IDEAS, but it seems some people equate quality with popularity. Is the 'culture of celebrity' that afflicts Western movies, television and radio creeping in to weblogs as well?
These thoughts were prompted by the recent weblog discussion on power laws and how they relate to weblogs. Actually the topic of discussion was whether your weblog operates in broadcasting mode, or conversation mode. The general consensus is that A-List bloggers (i.e. the most popular bloggers) are broadcasters, while the majority of us are in conversation mode. I accept the reason for this is that A-List bloggers in general are not able to converse with their many readers. And conversely, because C-List bloggers (my term for the rest of us) have relatively few readers, we're much more able to participate in conversations with our readers. Comments by Bill Seitz and Tom Coates helped me to realise that these are trends and not necessarily applicable to every person. I'm a big fan of individualism, but I don't mind tipping my hat to a generalisation every now and then - for the common good ;-)
Nevertheless this whole conversation about 'broadcasting mode vs conversation mode' has made me uncomfortable. The reason is that at a deep level I object to the notion of classifying something based on how popular it is. Which brings me back to the A-List. Power laws as they relate to weblogs are basically a Popularity Index. On the Web, popularity is measured by how many links a website receives. If you are at the head of a weblog power law, it means you have lots of incoming links and are therefore very popular - you're on the A-List. It's just like the movies. Bruce Willis is an A-List actor, because many people buy tickets to his movies (incoming links?) and therefore he is very popular. But consider this: do you think that all Bruce Willis movies are A-grade material? Would you compare Armageddon with Citizen Kane? Now consider this: just because a person is an A-List blogger, does it necessarily mean that person produces A-grade content?
Don't get me wrong, a lot of times A-List bloggers do produce A-grade content. There was an excellent comment made on David Weinberger's weblog, by Chris (responding to a comment by me):
"You can't always say that the "A-List" isn't quality, often it is. Why? Because they're giving people what they want and have been for a while - they have the experience."
I agree. All I'm saying is that the A-List doesn't necessarily produce quality content. Content should always be judged on its own merits. I strongly believe that ultimately it's ideas you should judge and not the person. This is not a theory I've just suddenly come up with - it's something I've blogged consistently about. For example, Clay Shirky linked to me back in July when I wrote that weblogs should be topic-first, not author-first.
Topics are a good way to classify ideas, which is why I'm a big fan of tools such as k-collector and Topic Exchange. Those tools democratize weblogging - because they give readers the opportunity to discover new voices who have written on topics of interest to them. And they give writers an opportunity to sit right alongside the "A-List", if they happen to have written something on the same topic.
My point is this: don't judge the quality of a weblog on how popular it is. Read deeper and judge the ideas that have been expressed. Do you judge the quality of a movie on whether it has an A-List actor in it? If so, you are not exercising your mind.
Judge the quality of a weblog on the value of its ideas.
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Well I suppose the question is not whether we should categorise by popularity, but whether or not popularity maps onto useful categories. My specific and explicit position is that popularity ABSOLUTELY doesn't map anywhere near 100% onto quality, but it does map more than 50% onto TYPE. Probably it's an interplay between the two.
It's very clearly a mistake to think that highly conversation weblogs (by which I DON"T mean weblogs where the author has long engagement with their readers, but instead ones where the weblogger engages with other webloggers in conversational ways - as equals - cf. Livejournal and 20six) will be in ANY way able to reach massive traffic levels without changing. Nor is it practical to think that someone who is maintaining a highly subject focused site will be able to maintain interest if no one else wants to read it. If you're looking to converse with friends, then having an audience is difficult. If you've got an audience, then it's not easy to treat them all individually as friends.
Basically my position would be that it's not a value judgement to say that one weblog gets more traffic than another. Nor is it a value judgement to say that they are of different type or fulfil different functions for the weblogger themselves or their communities.
With regard to your subject-based point, I actually really disagree. I think subject-based versus individual-based maps almost totally only publishing versus conversational models and that there's room for a spectrum of activity here - and that one of the core strengths of weblogs is that they allow individuals to express opinions on a whole range of different subjects unconstrained. At the bottom and middle parts of the power law, weblogs are no more or less than representations of people - people who we can try and befriend, agree with or disagree with, come to trust or not trust, and in a generally pretty generalised way. My piece on mass amateurisation has stuff around this:
"In terms of self-representation, the homepage is like a statue carved out of marble labelled carefully at the bottom where the weblog is like an avatar in cyberspace that we wear like a skin. It moves with us - through it we articulate ourselves. The weblog is the homepage that we wear."
"And this is the big leap forward - this is where the value of weblogs lies in the newly amateurised world. This flexibility of publishing creates a fluid and living form of self-representation, the 'homepage (as a place)' has become the 'weblog (as a person)' that can articulate a voice."
Posted by: Tom Coates | October 26, 2003 4:37 AM
I like that metaphor: "the weblog is like an avatar in cyberspace that we wear like a skin". So I guess you are saying that weblogs are author-first, not topic-first. I agree to the extent that a weblog is an expression of a person's mind and so is inextricably tied to that person (unless it is a group weblog). If I was to come up with a metaphor to express my point I'd say that the weblog author is the Artist, while the weblog content is the Art that is produced. My point of view is that the end product, the content, is what matters most. If Di Vinci had a weblog, it would have been incredibly interesting to subscribe to and follow - because he was a fascinating person. But in the final analysis, it would've been the Ideas he wrote in that weblog which had the enduring value. It's the Ideas (or the Art) which interests me.
But really I think there's room for both points of view and one doesn't negate the other. Weblogs *are* author-first if we look at them as avatars. But equally weblogs are filled with Content (Art?), which can be viewed as the "end product" - and can be mapped into topics to allow others to find them, etc.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | October 26, 2003 1:17 PM
Richard, I certainly value ideas, art and content, but as I said elsewhere in a comment, the context makes a huge difference to our pattern-recognizing minds. Also, you might be interested in Denham Grey's latest post called Harvesting Knowledge: Can we really do it?. He says: "Knowledge is not an object, it is ephemeral, emergent, very relationship & context dependent." Once you start buying into that, I think you might move closer to the author-first side of the spectrum. You still have good points on both popularity vs. quality and you don't have to like the artist to like his or her art. And, back to Tom's post, I love the *idea* of "through it (the weblog) we articulate ourselves." Voice is an inseparable combination of content and author.
Posted by: Janet Tokerud | October 28, 2003 10:44 PM