We need a new word.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about blogging as the new corporate job.

I’m not happy with applying the same word to what I do and what corporate public relations offices do.

To me, blogging is about exploiting the Internet as a cheap publishing medium for individuals. While coporate and commercial entities can certainly use the same technologies, their motivations are not the motivations of individuals.

For instance, the article referenced above talks about a gourmet popcorn company who is looking for a corporate blogger to maintain a company blog about the “love of popcorn”. Imagine for a second that you were surfing the net for information about the best popcorn, and you encounter such a blog. What can you learn from it?

You certainly could learn that the Dale & Tomas Popcorn company makes gourmet popcorn, but you could learn that from their conventional advertising.

Perhaps you could learn popcorn recipes or gain ideas for parties, but again, you could learn that from a more conventional website.

You could try to post comments about your favorite brands. But what happens if your favorite brand isn’t the right one? Suppose you think that the corporate sponsor’s popcorn tastes like packing material. Maybe it even does. Because the blog has the ability (and, in fact, the incentive) to censor negative comments about their product, you can’t actually learn anything useful about the quality of their product. You might just as well be watching a commercial.

Don’t be fooled. Corporations are interested in blogs for one reason only: they think they can use them to sell their products. They don’t work for you: they work for their corporate taskmasters.

They aren’t blogging, they are plugging.

I’ve begun to wonder if many so-called A-list bloggers do nothing more than wander around the country having dinner with one another. One blogger expressed some dissatisfaction with one of these dinners and his words struck a chord with me:

Everything I love about blogging is reversed at a blogging dinner. I love that blogs and particularly my RSS reader level the playing field – the idea is king not the person who blogs it. Contrast that with a blog dinner – where the A-list blogger is king; everyone wants to talk to the A-listers and the whole enterprise revolves around them. I also hate the forced conversations – how many times can you talk about your RSS reader, your blogging software and Del.icio.us?

Indeed.

I must admit, I’ve been a teeny bit perplexed by one of my website statistics: the majority of my traffic appears to still be using Internet Explorer. I would like to think that brainwagon readers are a bit more discerning, and would shift to using Firefox or Mozilla, both much better choices. But over at the Jer zone, they seemed to have uncovered something interesting: referer spammers (which sadly, still account for the vast majority of my traffic) invariably choose to masquerade as Internet Explorer. When you take that into account, Mozilla, Firefox and Safari jump WAY up in the popularity counts.

Thanks to Dan for pointing this out.

The EFF has an interesting article on Howto Blog Anonymously.

What’s a more interesting question is why would you want to?

It’s not that I can’t think of a reason, I’m just curious as to why people feel that they need to talk about something, and then choose to disassociate themselves from their words.

Sure, there is the personal security aspect. When you open the door to the world and allow them to peek in, there is always the risk that something you’d rather not let get out gets out, and somebody you’d rather not know about it will learn about it.

A small variation on this theme is the “my work doesn’t approve of my opinions” aspect, in other words, your job security.

Are there other reasons to try to communicate with others while remaining anonymous? Shouldn’t we all strive to make statements which we will stand by with the integrity of our own names? If we aren’t going to stand by our statements, then why bother making them in a public forum at all?

Over at Contentious, Amy is trying to answer the age old introspective question facing most bloggers: “Why do you blog?”

I meet quite a few people who don’t understand why anyone would write a blog. To them, I mostly ask “Why do you bother talking?”

Let’s be brutally honest: most of us don’t have anything really innovative to say, and even if we did, we’d be struggling to say it in a way that won’t leave an audience begging for sleep. So, why do we bother?

We bother because we all have the need to talk.

My blog is at least seventy five percent therapy. I blog to serve as a place to sound out opinions and feelings for which I don’t have another outlet. Even the more nominally pragmatic topics on my blog (such as my many personal geek projects) aren’t written so much inform others as to fufill my own need to talk about the things which interest me.

Personal anecdote: I began being interested in computers at a very young age, probably
10 or 11 years old. By the time I was sixteen, I had bought my very first computer, and was eagerly teaching myself the mysteries of how it worked. Very few of my peer group were very interested, and even those that were interested weren’t motivated enough to spend a year of their part time job money to buy computers of their own. So, I proceeded mostly on my own, aided by magazines and books.

I remember one afternoon when I was at my Grandmother Busch’s house. She was a very kind woman, and I had earned a significant portion of my computer money by performing lawn work for her over the previous year. I was happily explaining some minor feature of something having to do with my Atari 400 to her, and then trudged off to the next room. I recall overhearing this conversation between my her and my mom:

Grandma: “Boy, that kid really likes his computer, doesn’t he?”
Mom: “Yep, he really does.”
Grandma: “He seems to be really smart, like he knows everything about it.”
Mom: “Yep, he’s a smart one.”
Grandma: “I don’t understand a single thing he’s talking about.”
Mom: “Me neither”
Grandma: “He doesn’t seem to mind though, as long as I nod.”
Mom: “Yep, that’s what I do.”

Somethings may have changed, but that aspect of my personality probably hasn’t changed at all.

In the background, I do have some big ideas and consistent themes: technology is fun, copyrights and licensing are stifling individual creativity, and one learns best by doing rather than watching. I hope some of these come through from time to time. But really it boils down to a personal need for an expressive outlet.

Individuals need expressive outlets. The world is better when we talk, and also better when we stop from time to time and listen.

Russell Beattie mentioned Mike Rowehl’s new feedhacks.com blog. His major hack is a WordPress plugin that allows you to include RSS feeds in posts. For instance, by entering the tag <feedster search=”vandewettering”>, you get:

Nifty!

Dave has begun to come to his senses:

…it all comes back to what I keep saying – do your best work, put it out there, serve the audience you care about well and then let it ride. Worry about your audience, not your ranking. Eventually everyone will realize the bogosity of the latter and if you burn your karma with the former in pursuit of those rankings, you are screwed.

I’d amend this only to say that it doesn’t really matter whether everyone realizes the bogosity. I care what some people think, but I don’t give a rats ass what everyone thinks.

On a suggestion from a reader, I’ve decided to try to get better statistics on my RSS subscribers by managing my RSS feed via feedburner.com. For now, what this means for you, my subscriber is that instead of my normal RSS feed, you can use the URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainwagon to get the syndicated version of my feed. If you feel comfortable with all this stuff, try switching over to it and let me know what your experience is. If it seems to work, I’ll probably try to figure out the mod_rewrite juju necessary to send all requests for my feeds there, and then I’ll be able to get a better idea of who the regular users of my website are.

Thanks!

I went to check the PubSub LinkRanks for brainwagon today, only to find that my ranking, which had been floating in the mid 50,000 range, was now ranked closer to the 992,461. A closer inspection of pubsub indicates that positions beginng at 10 are all occupied by mystery domain deai.com. Methinks somebody has been gaming pubsub for fun or profit.

I’ve noticed something which I sort of find surprising: this website has no daily readers.

I’ve been scanning the logs of all the people who come to my website, and by far the majority, probably 90% of all hits, come here via Google searches. Not from hitlists on websites, or directories, or anything else, but just people entering strange keywords which, by virtue of the eclectic nature of most of my posts, send them to brainwagon.

One unfortunate thing is that my statistics do not capture those who read brainwagon via RSS: statistics on those who access the RSS feed are not available from statcounter.com‘s statistics. Since I do make the entire text of my postings available in the RSS feed, perhaps all my regular readers are reading brainwagon via RSS.

I’ll have to do some more research in my log files to help figure that out.

Michael Gorman explains his previous article as “satirical”. I think that his piece could be described as many things, but satire is not one of the qualities it could be said to possess in abundance.

One wonders why he bothered to respond at all via the Internet, given that he only believes that edited/published work qualify as “serious”.

Thanks to Dave W. for the link from Ed Cone.