Sunday, July 8, 2007

In the previous post, I juxtaposed a critical bit describing Baudelaire’s 19th century mode of providing acknowledgment in his dedications (what we bloggers sometimes call linky-love) with a Courbet painting in the sidebar. The painting, “Bonjour Monsieur Courbet,” depicts Courbet as a wanderer meeting Alfred Bruyas, in real life his patron. Where Baudelaire provided linky-love in his dedications, Courbet and other artists achieved the same respectful acknowledgment of patronage through graphical depiction. (The painting is in a widget that I toy with every day, it won’t be there long… the title I gave it is “Nobody Expects the Third Republic,” and the caption reads “Nice dog.” “Thanks. Nice beard.”)

How many million bloggers are there today, each of us sharing original writing, mark-up, media files, and cross links to each other and to interesting web content generally? Six million? I grabbed that number out of a hat based on Technorati data about the number of blogs they track (14 million in April?). I like the number because it means that one in a thousand people on the planet is an active blogger, which is huge! Recently the growth of blogging has slowed, and we’ll probably see a lot slower growth as people get comfortable socializing in network spaces like facebook and myspace and chattering with each other and exchanging links through tools like twitter.

With millions and millions of bloggers writing, the idea of an “A-list” seems fanciful. But it is an idea that has stuck with us since the infancy of blogging when there were several people who mattered and many people who seemingly didn’t. Gradually a few blogging tools for web publishing came to dominate in an emerging market of bloggers and in a few years there were millions of us practicing the craft. But that early sense that a few mattered more, that some were empowered as gatekeepers, hung on. The “A-list” is a meme, an illusion, and I don’t really know if there is an antiviral out there that can kill it.

How did I get from Courbet to the “A-list” meme? Well, I was thinking about peacocks and manure piles, Flaubert and Madame Bovary, Pete Doherty, and George Michael. Kate Moss. Thinking about Degas’ “L’Absinthe,” dandyism, class consciousness and class struggle. I was thinking about how artists and writers need patronage, and how in the good old days the best could always get a contract with a pope or a prince to paint a ceiling or something, the patronage of aristocracy. In mid-19th century France the ranks of the aristocracy were still a little thin, give or take Napoleon’s relatives, but the bourgeoisie were there to take up the slack, sponsoring the works of artists and writers who were working outside the normative boundaries of the Acadamie Francaise. But just as important as the bourgeois fan base was the salon itself, the art-o-sphere where the creative types gathered, the interweaving of mutual support that the artists provided each other.

Which brings me back to the meme of the “A-list.” Kent Newsome provided a nice post on June 29th, the five stages of blogging. In that post he reinforces the meme of the “A-list” and he draws comments from many people, including Seth Finkelstein and Hugh MacLeod, two bloggers who mercilessly reinforce the meme every chance they get. I wish they would give it up. The only virtual interferon that exists to kill pernicious memes is inattention.

Technorati tracks links and provides an illusion of “A-listiness.” But who is tracking traffic? Regardless, we do sponsor each other, provide patronage and mutual support. That’s the key thing I took away from Kent’s post. Assuming for a moment that there is an “A-list” and it’s defined by traffic, I’d like to suggest that both Glenn Reynolds and Duncan Black are on it. I don’t think any of the tech bloggers are on it. Does Scoble get enough geek traffic to qualify? Probably not. In fact, if you’re not writing for boingboing, then just shut up about being A-list in the geek world. Elsewhere, Arianna’s aggregation probably pulls enough traffic to be called “A-list,” but I doubt that any of her individual contributors do.

Web publishing has a few stars and a lot of lesser lights. The blog world comprises communities of bloggers. I think the real “A-listers” are brilliant writers like Helen Razer, and curatorial and design geniuses like Regina Debatty. All of the whining, the caviling, the chest pounding about who is and is not “A-list” fades to background noise in the face of this kind of talent. And high traffic is not necessarily a reward for talent.

[tags]emily dickinson[/tags]

{ Comments on this entry are closed }