To blog or just to have dinner conversation?
Chatting up one's own crowded company of ardent opinions and and defensible positions is the stage personality -- the celebrity of blog. But that's pretty bland. It's passive recessive. It's almost like a media reporter who leads with the wink/nod that the Blogosphere is what blogs are known for.
Do you blog for the sake of touting your blogging credentials? Do you wave your blog pass to get into sites and discussions otherwise off limits? Didn't think so.
Blogs are vessels. They hold our peeves and praises in an editorial without editors. It's a one-sided debate from all sides of the aisle. But the most hermetic blog is porous with links and collaborations inspired elsewhere. Blogs live on an island where the word "my" is implicit. Any other pronoun will not do.
As a communications medium blogs fall much closer to closed circuits than printing presses -- confessionals, not tabloids. The cover charge for entry is a medium ego or larger: Yes, that's your personality on my screen. Where "the media" revolves around third-party celebrities and consumed by third-person audiences, blogs are decidedly first-person, singular. The moment a second party is involved a blog loses its "come-as-I-am" authenticity. When you're dressing your blogger in bedclothes or tuxedos, you know the jig is up. Keeping up an appearance is no more heroic than leaving your journal out to be read.
It's not a pretense to long for that same third-party bonding shared by media creations and their legions. What could be more flattering than the attentions of a stranger? But it's less than sincere to pose as a broker, referee or huckster whose credentials rest on their own blogging rites. Blogs are devoid of credibility just as an individual cannot confer credibility onto themselves no matter how big their name, persuasive their fight, or widely held their blogging postures.
* Tagging productive reference sites
* Endorsing content and then commenting on its impact
* Using a blog roll to reflect on your own aspirations
* News feeds that synthesize the thinking of otherwise disconnected worlds
That's where blogs become bigger than the bloggers who blog them and the self-referential nature of first person communications.
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