i've been howard-ed

While I regularly read newspapers and online news sites, I find most of this blog's content from reading other blogs. And that's the case for most of the bloggers I read daily, who are usually kind enough to link back to the blogs from which they're pilfering.
For "link blogs," blogs that point out interesting links with little commentary, attribution comes in the form of a simple "via [blog]" or "found at [blog]." Good examples of "link blogs" include Fiendish Is The Word (eclectic linkage), Geisha Asobi (a roster of oddities), things magazine (links about obscure art and culture), and, my favorite "links blog," The Solipsistic Gazette (tracks visual culture).
Then, there's another kind of blog, notable for its clever commentary. The "commentary blogs" I like focus on literary and pop culture. Like most blogs that aren't online diaries, these blogs also link to each other, but since they link to commentary, they usually refer to specific posts. And, since they're commentary blogs, not link blogs, they usually comment on the posts they're referring readers to. Almost no blogger is bitchy enough to (regularly) link to posts they dislike, so the commentary is usually complimentary ("[Blogger's name] made a good point about…").
This leads to an explicitly personal relationship between "commentary bloggers," in which they tease each other ("pint-sized polemicist Maud Newton") and treat each more as characters or friends than as simple link-sources. (Maud writes of Old Hag: "We'd have guessed she was a Sauvignon Blanc girl, and if she'd just come for a visit we'd share a bottle and try to figure out a way to steal her smarts.")

In an article in Sunday's The Washington Post, Jennifer Howard writes,

Bloggers know what they like and what they don't like, and they aren't afraid to tell you why. And they get to use bad words that will never see print inside a family newspaper. But to get to the good stuff, you have to wade through more and more self-congratulation and mutual admiration. Call it blogrolling.

She continues,

From the Old Hag, who gives us blogrolling in a nutshell with this Nov. 7 post: "We'd also like to take a moment to draw your attention to some new blogs of note. If you look at our links list, you'll see Chica (whom we TOTALLY discovered, and now she's all Gawkered and Terry'd and does Choire EVER LINK TO ME?). . . . "
Note the offhand references and the verbing of names -- the Old Hag assumes that not only do you read blogs, you're on a first-name basis with the hip dudes and dudettes who run them. What, you've never heard of Chica, Terry and Choire? Let me introduce you, in order, to the up-and-coming blogger behind Cup of Chicha (www.nchicha.com/cupofchicha/); Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout, who moonlights as a blogger with his site About Last Night (www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/); and ur-New York media blog Gawker.com and its editor, Choire Sicha, who maintains his own blog at www.choiresicha.com. I only know this because I've been reading these sites long enough to get a feel for the usual suspects. Otherwise I'd have no clue either. And I'm not sure why I should want to.

(A tangent: I'm not sure I'm an up-and-coming blogger. I've been blogging for almost two years, my blog slowly shifting from a links blog to a commentary-and-links hybrid.)

I have two reponses to Jennifer Howard's argument that blogs, once bastions of outsider democracy, are now "turning into the same insider's game played by the old establishment media the bloggerati love to critique."

1. I tried to explain, in the beginning of this post, that "comments blogs" invariably lead to an appreciative online friendship between bloggers. I think this is a built-in feature of the blog-genre.
2. As Terry Teachout mentions on his blog, About Last Night, new blogs, based on the worth of their posts, get linked to all the time. The Elegant Variation has been online barely two months, but it's become a regular among the "commentary blogs." If Jennifer Howard weren't trying to make blogs' "cronyism" a trend with deep enough implications to merit an article (and I have to say, I'm happy she tried; I like seeing my blog's name in print), she'd probably realize that what she dislikes about these blogs is not their "insider's game" (as Elegant Variation proves, there is no "insider's game"). Instead, she dislikes the blogs' playful, self-referential, tone. It's unfair to conflate the two, but without this conflation, would an attack on the style of a handful of blogs merit an article? Probably not, but her conflation, in my opinion, makes her article, at best, irrelevent.

Posted by nchicha at November 16, 2003 12:44 AM