Paul's Down-Home Page

There’s a lot of bloviating going on here in the blogosphere. (Free translation: there’s an unholy lot of self-referential navel-gazing going on among people who write weblogs). This isn’t new, of course; one of the first things that people used the then-new AltaVista engine for was to ego-surf to see how many times they could find their names listed. This always reminds me of Steve Martin in The Jerk. However, there’s precedent; after all, Google ranks pages in part by counting the number of links to particular pages, and academics have valued scholarly papers based on the number of following papers that cite them. Blogging just makes it easier to see who’s linking to whom (case in point: the truly cool Internet Ecosystem).

This leads to the development of what I call an egosystem, where the value of blogs is perceived to be related to how many links a blog has and where they come from. In the egosystem, if you get linked by a blog geek (and I mean that in a goodway) like Dave Winer or Tim O’Reilly , your blogcred goes up. If you get linked to by one of the uberbloggers– y’know, like Glenn Reynolds or Den Beste, well, you’re a star in the making.

The interesting thing to me about this particular egosystem (as opposed, say, to People Magazine or the Democratic National Commitee) is that it superficially seems to ignore the value of content in favor of link count and weight. Really, though, it does just the opposite– where a site like AmIHotOrNot presents context-free photos for you to rank, with a blog you get all the context you want– possibly more than you want, as in Eric & Dawn Olson’s continual blogged arguing. You can make decisions on whether something’s worthwhile or not by reading it! What a concept. (Of course, having said that, I shall be crushed if my BlogHotOrNot rating stays down near the 1.0 end of the scale.)

NZBear has an interesting discussion about the myopia of some parts of the egosystem. Most bloggers in a particular topic area– surprise– tend to stick together, so that warblogs, or blogs about technology, or blogs by garbage collectors, etc., have lots of back-and-forth, self-referential linking. He says “Bring on the blogs by ordinary people!” Amen to that.

Patrick Nielsen-Hayden is an editor for Tor Books. He also maintains a terrific weblog. However, so far I must say that I like his wife’s blog better, primarily because on the left-hand side there’s a list of other SF authors who blog! Some of my favorites include Steve Gould and James Patrick Kelly, not to mention Charlie Stross. Go there now.

Charlie Stross has become one of my favorite science-fiction authors. His short stories “A Colder War”, “Antibodies”, and “Lobsters” have all appeared in recent editions of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, quite deservedly so. I just found out that he has a weblog, including a collection of stories available on the web. If you like science fiction, go there now.

According to this AP story, a man drowned in a vat of chocolate. The accident happened at Kargher Chocolate, which already has had at least one product recall. Somehow I think this accidental death is going to be fodder for every morning radio show and late-night monologuist for the next few days…

Thomas and I made it to New Orleans last night. Our flight was uneventful, but we had about a one-hour runway hold in Atlanta because of bad weather to the west. Now I’m sitting in what must be the world’s most uncomfortable chair at the Morial Convention Center. The convention center boasts 1.1 million square feet, each one of which is air-conditioned to within an inch of its life. We’re here for Microsoft‘s MGB, working in the competitive lab area. So far, no Microsoft people have shown up, so John, Peter, Sam, and I are working on various other things. In my case, I’m finishing the third book chapter so I can get it back to MS before my end-of-the-month deadline.