The Campaign for Real Blogs - Turn off the A List in May....

Tuesday, April 15. 2008

The Campaign for Real Blogs - Turn off the A List in May....

OK, OK - I'll admit I read this on Techmeme over morning coffee and I know its considered dreadfully bad form to comment on a story once its there, but this is too good to ignore - its the most excellent rant about the silliness of Social Media, A Listers and our bubblecosm in general:

I have no problem if the NYT follows me in an effort to make sure I realize they have a Twitter account. But I'm OFFENDED when a person, a real human being, decides to follow me along with 10,000 other people.

What does this act say to me?

Does the person really want to follow my conversations? Obviously not - they are on a blind follow-fest and I am an appetizer.
This is no different from the heydays of MySpace when some people collected 10K plus friends. Aside from Tila Tequila who now has an absurd and annoying reality show - it's an obnoxious and futile attempt at social media stardom.
I use this as an anecdote. My beef isn't with Twitter, but with the shameless self-promotion that occurs 24/7 on the web, to which Twitter is another tool. Conversation is being comodified - and people think they can become 'experts' in online conversations.

Guess what: "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile."

Shame on you, popping our rosy views like that - there I was thinking that all those A Listers valued me as a unique and special friend

How much of the internet is produced by social media experts re-hashing what others have already said on the web in their own words? Better yet, how much do they charge to teach you how to re-hash those same words?

You mean A Listers copy lesser known people's ideas and publish them sans attribution - well I never !!!

There needs to be space for successful blogs beyond Tech and Politics. I know there are lots of mommy-bloggers and food blogs, etc - but the most successful blogs right now are either tech or politics. Just take a look at the Technorati top 100 and try to disagree with me. Then consider this: Half of those tech-blogs are navel gazing, writing about either
A. Tools that enable + empower new media.
B. Other A-list bloggers.

More fool us for reading them then.......

So how about a Campaign for Real Blogs then, how about turning off all your A Listers for a month, starting May 1st. No Scoble, TechCrunch, Gadgetzines etc for all of May. Eschew Techmeme.

Go on, go on strike - find the other flowers in the fields.

Posted by Alan Patrick in Blogstuff at 10:05 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0) | Top Exits (0)

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Hi Alan,

I've never followed any so called "A listers" - they've never been A listers to me, they've always been spammers and marketeers. A listers are people of importance I thought, and I have never felt any of the Spam Set (Scoble, Calacanis, et al) have had ay impact on my life.

So, I will certainly join you by not tuning in to them in May, just like I do every other month!

Thayer

#1 Thayer Driver (Homepage) on 2008-04-15 10:51 (Reply)

Thayer, in that case you need to get addicted first

- so follow 10 of your choice from now till then - go on, it'll be worth a blogpost or 2 for you anyway !

#2 alan p on 2008-04-15 11:29 (Reply)

It's the classic equilibrium between getting to the raw meat, or settling for reprocessor aggregators like TechCrunch. Right now I'm not particularly happy with Techcrunch; it's not delivering sufficient viewpoint aggregation and new insight on non-scoop stories (for scoop stories, I can forgive rush jobs).

I'm desperately keen to escape the SV echo chamber but right now techcrunch is bringin' the beef (sorry - scoops). I wish google reader was sentient enough to filter out overlapping stories with HackerNews, SAI and Techmeme though; if only according to order of preference that I have to manually set, and ideally, according to quality (difficult to calculate such a subjective measure though). At least then there would be pressure to be unique and high quality.

Right now the 'market' for my eyeball feels fairly uncompetitive; I seem to have stalled at getting to the primary sources beyond the food packers like Techcrunch (though my feed flux is much greater than any other physical or digital product I care to think of, except TV stations). So don't get comfortable, Broadstuff!

#3 phil bradley (Homepage) on 2008-04-15 11:34 (Reply)

Patrick, can you design us a logo like the Campaign for Real Ale logo so we can tell the difference

http://www.brightoncamra.org.uk/CAMRA%20logo%20b%20on%20w.jpg

#4 George Black (Homepage) on 2008-04-15 17:51 (Reply)

I'm glad you liked the post.

We are starting to get into silly season with the A-list bloggers, huh?

#5 Digidave (Homepage) on 2008-04-16 00:11 (Reply)

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