ack. and more.

Doc Searls responds to Jennifer Howard's Washington Post article. But why is my picture wedged between the title "Celebrating Conditional Celebrity" and the line, "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people"?

The title is besides the point of Howard's article and Doc Searls' response; Doc argues (in my opinion, correctly) that it's unfair to infer much about the current state of blogging from a small sampling, but the phrase "Conditional Celebrity" seems to imply that what's ridiculous about this sampling is the obscurity of its chosen blogs. The beginning of Doc's post turns the blogs mentioned in Howard's article, mine especially, into "outsider" blogs ("fifteen people"), a distinction that, despite not being explicit, confirms Howard's observations more than any of the blogs she mentions do.

Like I said, though, that's not the main point of Doc's post. Going through his arguments:
-He writes, "I have the same problem with Jennifer's preoccupation wity celebrity as I did with Clay's preoccupation with power. Weblogs are about neither, at least not fundamentally." (My comment: I don't understand the sense in which Doc is refuting Clay; Clay doesn't seem to be discussing what weblogs are "about." Rather, he's showing why it's likely that blogs will never be linked to equally.)
-Doc argues with Howard's terms: "medium," "newsworthy," etc. (I feel strange defending Howard, but what's the relevance of whether or not blogs are a medium? Also: when arguing that blogs are popular [meaning, linked to] based on the worthiness, not the "newsworthiness," of their posts, he's shifting the context of Howard's comment. Howard is probably saying that, to a blogger and the blogger's usual readers, personal anecdotes can be as worthy of a post as a new book release. Doc, however, is discussing what makes a blog popular or link-worthy. Given his negative response to Clay's emphasis on incoming links, I'm not sure how to reconcile his focus on blogs' link-worthiness. On the other hand, I admire his argument that it's insight, rather than sass, that really gets a blog noticed. It's not a fair critique of Howard's use of "newsworthiness," but it is a fair critique of why a blog's "cronyism" isn't that important to a blog's popularity or "insider status.")
-He sums it up here: "If we want our blogs valued, if we want Google juice, we only have to try to say something worthwhile — meaning worth a link. It's not a lot more complicated than that."