The Tail That Wags the Blog
They behave like fun-loving slackers, but they're secretly staging a  
coup

By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, August 21, 2005; Page W13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/16/ 
AR2005081601229.html




Rough Draft
(Richard Thompson)


I constantly tell myself: Ignore the blog. Do your work. You are an  
enormous literary figure and cultural icon, not a mere "blogger." You  
must produce high-end journalism with grand themes and huge groaning  
multi-syllabic words like "eschatological," and you can't be  
dribbling away all your ideas on the blog. Be strong! Resist the blog!

And then . . . I hear it yowling.



The blog is hungry. The blog will not be ignored. It is an insatiable  
little beast, a creature still unclassified by science -- hairy,  
warty, slobbering, with its own fiendish agenda. I often fantasize  
about killing the blog, but I worry that it will respond just like  
the crazed computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey": It will try to kill  
me first.

The blog originated in January as a catch basin for mental detritus,  
for the kind of stuff not good enough for print, but too good to  
waste on casual conversation or, worse, mere thinking. But this  
spring I began allowing "comments," and the blog suddenly mutated.  
America, it turns out, is full of smart, clever, creative people who  
happen to have no interest in working and whose employers have  
unwisely given them Internet access. Thus every day, on my blog,  
these strangers show up, just to shoot the breeze, flirt, kvetch,  
veer off topic and, most of all, pay zero attention to what I have  
written.

Let's cut to the chase: The blog ignores me.

I am constantly having to post something new just to make the blog  
interested in me again. My contribution to the blog is what I call  
the "Kit." The commenters' part is called the "Kaboodle." Some of the  
everyday Kaboodlers make references to "our blog," as though they're  
co-proprietors. It's obvious at this point that the Kaboodle is  
trying to take over the blog. And it won't stop with me: I can  
picture the Kaboodle rambling across the countryside, panting  
heavily, stomping through people's gardens, tinkling on little kids'  
tricycles, etc.

The general trend in blogs seems to be the diminution of the blogger  
and the elevation of the commentariat. There may come a day when even  
the human components of the blog will begin to be overshadowed by  
automatic features. You can imagine a TiVo-like blog: The blogging  
software knows automatically what the blogger and the commenters  
would say on any given topic. Already, many political blogs are so  
predictable and formulaic it's hard to tell whether the author is a  
person or a machine. A thousand years from now, blogs will have  
explored the universe, telling alien races about the human beings who  
used to be masters of the blogs but, because of irrational and stupid  
blog postings, had to be exterminated.

I find that my own blogging is increasingly mechanical and formulaic.  
As an artist, my normal impulse is to write things that people don't  
care about and, ideally, can't even understand. Gibberish. But my  
freedom of expression is hampered by the blogging software that  
tracks every page view. In the old days, the age of print, a  
journalist had very little data on how many people read a particular  
story. Now I can track readership second by second, eyeball by  
eyeball. It's obvious what people want: political screeds and  
celebrity gossip. A few weeks back, I blogged three paragraphs on  
Karl Rove. Someone at Google News linked to the blog, and a Rovestorm  
erupted, a festival of vituperation, with a commensurately  
outstanding number of page views. Now I pretty much have to write  
about Rove all the time. (Contrary to what you may have heard, my  
blog item "Karl Rove Linked to Hoffa Disappearance" was completely  
fair.)

The continual focus-grouping explains why most bloggers write as  
though their primary goal is to rise in the Google search results.  
The more you mention people like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the  
more readers you will have, and the more links, and the more you will  
rise in Google's estimation. I have nothing really to say about Brad  
Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and am not even remotely interested in Brad  
Pitt and Angelina Jolie, but I know that my blog will be read by more  
people if it mentions famous celebrities who might be secretly  
boinking, such as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

And let me just add, purely for the sake of Google: sex, alien  
abduction, Oprah, Tom Cruise, Lindsay Lohan, jumbo hooters the size  
of watermelons, Dick Cheney, Mark of the Beast, Armageddon, free money.

Read Joel Achenbach weekdays at washingtonpost.com/achenblog.