On 07-Feb-07, at 3:49 PM, Aditya Kapil wrote:
This is contradictory to a newcomers understanding. Why would one
create a
'private space' on publicly viewed sites? Specially when they
allow posting
comments. Are you saying that the blogger wishes that only like minded
people visit / interact with the site? How would one control this?
Adit,
When you "blog", who are you doing it for? Obviously, "entire world"
is not the right answer -- you're not thinking of your housemaid
putting aside her broom each morning to read your blog.
Everyone has some imagined sense of an audience when blogging --
that's the "private" domain of readers you seek. However, being a
publicly accessible website (albeit lost among the millions of
others), your actual readership may be nothing like your imagined
readership. You do not know this until it is brought to your
awareness -- when they leave a comment or when you find a link to
your site from elsewhere.
This leads to all sorts of tensions, with outcomes ranging from
restricting access to only those you want to be reading your blog
(common on LiveJournal) to obsessively tracking your readership
(common with Blogger and Wordpress), to turning exhibitionist,
putting everything out without caring who reads, and various shades
in between.
Blogging is a form of written communication that effortlessly spans
the entire range from private, one-on-one communication to mass
publication. It is not uncommon to even find the same blog jumping
around this range from post to post -- for example, an obscure blog
that makes a post that unexpectedly gets linked to a lot (related:
slashdot effect, boing boing effect) -- or even the same post being
obscure to one reading group but very popular to another, although
this is less easy to measure.
Most blogs are written by people who'd like a greater readership but
aren't prepared to face it when it actually comes -- for the few to
whom it actually comes. Contrary to what most blog pundits and
critics seem to say, I'll wager that blogging is a phenomenon of
conversation between small, intimate groups that is confused for a
public broadcast solely because of the public nature of the medium.
Blogging is NOT about people showing off their punditry skills.
That's just a fringe occurrence.
I will now shamelessly plug my earlier writing on the subject:
http://jace.seacrow.com/writing/2005/essence-of-blogging
http://jace.seacrow.com/tag/blogging
--
Kiran Jonnalagadda
http://jace.seacrow.com/
