The Too-Much-Information Superhighway

Just like my brother said he would he texted Wensday night begging... I mean really pleading just for a chance to be with me again... It took everything in me not to break shake and open my legs and heart to him again.

People who think that weblogging is dominated by octogenarian white male computer geeks like me should spend some time trolling Feedster for weblog posts about cities in their area.

I use the site's RSS search results to keep up with events in North Florida, wading through a torrent of melodramatic, angst-ridden young people blogging about their lives on sites like LiveJournal and AOL Journals.

In the case of Orlando, there's also a disturbingly large number of bloggers who seem to be on a first-name basis with the actor Orlando Bloom.

If there's a dominant group in weblogging today, it's females under 20. There are six million sites on LiveJournal, 67 percent are written by females, most in their teens.

While we're obsessing over weighty matters like the Google Toolbar and Eugene "Hurt So Good" Volokh, they're turning our wonky tech- and politics-obsessed medium into the Real World. One area college student was sharing so much -- name, residence, workplace, class schedule, sex life -- that I wanted to alert her parents. And I could have, since she identified them too.

Publishing · 2005/03/20 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Blogging is dominated by A-listers in the same way that political debate is dominated by obnoxious talk-show hosts. In one sense, 99.999% of the population is NOT the tiny oligarchy. In another sense, the favored few reach far more people than any random ranter.

To say that, e.g., the total number of people talking about office politics overall, far outweighs the number of talk-show hosts, is both a true statement, and can miss something.

Look at it this way: How many people are "affected" by RSS vs Atom? :-)

#1 · Seth Finkelstein · 2005/03/20

There's a big difference, though. Talk show hosts have infinitely better access to television and radio than random ranters. All bloggers compete at the same level.

The old-school subset of weblogging is dominated by a small group of early adopters and media darlings who link to each other like crazed minks. I'm as lazy as anyone about linking to the same people all the time.

However, how big is the group of people who would recognize the name of a single A-List blogger? 5,000? 20,000? Even if it's as high as 50,000, that leaves 99 percent of webloggers who don't know (and don't care) about their A-list overlords.

#2 · Rogers Cadenhead · 2005/03/20