Snappy the Clam

Well, as usual, I missed the 5 year anniversary of this exercise in distributed talking to myself.

There's been a bunch of issues in the air this week that are interesting to me. One is the brouhaha over the Steven Levy Newsweek piece, inspired by women merely discussing the possibility of a women's blogging conference - BlogHerCon (great name.) Mr Levy, as I am sure you have heard by now if you're not just a tool of the MSM (Bwah ha ha) wrote an article in which he opined that there weren't many women or people of color (translate: people who were not white men) involved in the runsoffatthemouthosphere. When you think about it, this not a new idea - it's really just the echo chamber meme seen slightly askew. The usual suspects have reacted in typically narcissistic fashion, deploring the very idea that anything connected with the nevertiresoftalkingaboutitselfosphere could possibly even for a stinky minute consider anything so exclusive as a women's blogging conference. Because it wouldn't be fair if the women had a conference and men weren't invited. It's not like the men have conferences and don't invite...oh,wait.

And once again, instead of thinking about ways we might be able to make this net open wider, instead of thinking about how we can make the Iamsofuckingcoolosphere even bigger and more relevant to people who don't spend much time bemoaning the lack of free wireless coffee in airport frequent flier clubs, we have people making the claim, with straight faces no less, implying that they actually believe this, that (wait for it) white men are somehow actually victims in modern American society. Because power, money, and not having to worry about being in certain parts of town after 10pm are crippling burdens.

And we're mostly being told this by (wait for it again) rich white men. So, do women get to discuss what they might bring to the brokenrecordosphere? No. Women get to listen to men make the whole discussion, as per usual, all about them.

This is the danger of that whole long tail business. Most BigBlogs I've seen discussing the long tail use it as a way to explain to you that they're not going to link to you, because, you see, there is a very small number of people at the top of the power law distribution who get 99.999999999% of all links, and there are the rest of you, who should see that the blogging revolution is really about being happy that 2 people who aren't related to you are reading your blog, you worthless scum. But at least you're empowered worthless scum.

Yes, yes, I know, it's a meritocracy. Or at least, this is the pleasant fiction the sametenguysoeverandoveragainosphere likes to tell itself in order to stave off those feelings that they're pretty much turning into the same sort of elitist club as the All-Seeing Eye of MSM. We're finally having the same bunch of people show up again and again and again in the same places year after year. Often by invitation only.

In short, careers are being made. Jeff "Who knows why I voted for Kerry" Jarvis has now revived his moribund media career (he invented Entertainment Weekly, you know. And he admits it) by getting regular (gasp) ReichsMSM gigs where, proving that cable news can actually be made more boring, he talks about blogs. On. Television. Meanwhile he struggles to decide what to call this whole thing - is it citizen's media? Volksmedia? (I did not make that last one up) Heimratsmedia? (OK, that one I did make up) - so that he can monetize it to within an inch of its life.

Blogging may have changed the means of production in providing more people (though still not everyone, mind you) with a press. That's true, but it's also a red herring. Where blogging hasn't changed anything is that it doesn't freely provide the gateways that draw attention to that press. Said attention still for the most part only comes from making nice with the nonexistent A-list.