May 16, 2005

ARIANNA ISN'T A BLOGGER

I caught a video clip of Arianna Huffington doing an interview on CNN and she talked about her "blog" The Huffington Post, and why she started it.

Let's get this out in the open right up front. I don't like Arianna or any of her co-bloggers because they're liberal and they're shrill, but my criticism of the site has nothing to do with that.

What bugs me is that the reasons she gives for starting the site tell me that she doesn't have the slightest idea what she's doing.

I've seen a lot of people start blogs, and they've all done it for the right reasons. They have something to say - be it about themselves, the world at large, or even just a chance to be funny in front of an audience besides friends and family - and they start a blog because they have no other platform available.

A blog is a publishing format of last resort. If person could get published with a newspaper, write a novel, or do stand-up, they'd be doing that. But blogging is their only outlet.

And because it is, that makes it precious and loved. It becomes a work of passion. A labor of love. It draws the author back again and again, day after day. It's not for the money - although some bloggers do generate income with it - it's about being able to make something all your own that you can point to and say, "*I* did this. It may not be beautiful or perfect, but it's mine. It's a part of who I am. An important part. And I love it."

Arianna - and, indeed, all her group-blog-buddies - have other outlets. Outlets that are higher profile, less prone to criticism and feedback, and far more renumerative. Their natural inclination is to leverage their time into productive activities, and this project goes counter to that. This sad collection of celebrity cat-blogging can't possibly hold any appeal, outside of the opportunity to publicly lick Arianna's backside while appearing to be hip and trendy because they're blogging.

The bloom will go off the rose, they will lose interest, they will find better things to do, and - one by one - they will drop out.

If they wanted to blog, they would start at Blogger like everyone else.

What troubles me most, though, is some of the phrases Arianna uses to describe her interest in the project:

Your thought doesn't have to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It can be put out there. Others respond. It can start a conversation and you can get on with the rest of your life.

You're SO wrong, Arianna.

Good blogging IS good writing. You don't just toss off a steaming pile of unfinished thought-crap, call it good, and wait for Lady Fortune to kick in your door toting buckets full of gold coins. Bloggers CARE about what they write, which is why they write it. Even on tiny posts, it's the blogger's best efforts that get published. They know it's not Hemmingway, but they do the best they can with what they have. Anyone who's struggled for half an hour tweaking a 3-line throwaway post knows what I'm talking about.

Arianna doesn't know. And she doesn't care.

But if she doesn't care, if she doesn't have a passion for making the best of the one tiny outlet that she has, WHY is she bothering with this?

She's power-hungry.

Check these quotes:

I wanted to bring together 300 of the most creative people in the country into the cyberspace, into the blogosphere, is because I believe the blogosphere is so important, it is changing the way we receive information so dramatically that I wanted to make sure that those people, who, as you say, have other platforms, would also have an online platform...

You have many stories that die on the front pages of the "New York Times." Big stories covered but then forgotten. There isn't enough follow-up, and the greatness of the blogosphere is that there is a lot of follow-up. A story is covered and re-covered and re-covered until your break through the static of a 500-channel universe, and that is how you can actually begin to bring about change and capture the public's imagination, and you have to do a lot of that.

[all emphasis added]

She looks at the blogosphere as a single entity with enormous power, and she lusts after it with deepest envy. She has fantasies of stepping in with a cabal of sycophants and grabbing this power for herself so that she can control "the public's imagination". She's under the delusion that all the scandals exposed by the blogosphere in the last year or so are directed from a single point of control, as though there were a handle that could be pulled to steer all the blogs in a single direction.

What she wants is to grab that handle.

To mangle a line from the Matrix, "there is no handle".

Arianna, darling, the blogosphere isn't a machine to be controlled from a single point, it's a herd of cats, and it'll go where it sees fit in ways that can be neither controlled nor predicted. It's not an actually entity, but rather the sum total of the individual human lives behind every blog. If you persist in your insane beliefs to the contrary, your project will disintegrate before your eyes, leaving you alone, ignored, and wondering what went wrong.

Bloggers who've started without readers understand that a blog can only invite and persuade, it cannot command and direct. The only tool it has is the original thoughts of the author, and his credibility with his peers. But trust amongst peers is a fragile thing, and only grows by pieces, one truth-telling post at a time. Arianna does not understand this. She thinks that cash and fame are a substitute for integrity, and that a blog's success can be bought and sold like shares of Time-Warner.

She's wrong, and I imagine she'll discover that soon enough as her empire crumbles.

And I will laugh. And I will keep on blogging. Because *I* know.

And *I* care.

Posted by: Harvey at 06:53 PM | Comments (29) | Add Comment
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