I posted the following pi9ece on my archive blog: nik.amagama.com last year in April and suddenly in the past few weeks i have received more than 4000 pieces of highly targeted [ito source and nature of sender] spam mail off the site. No response to requests has prevailed so i am goimng to amputate the piece from my old now redundant blog and i'm moving it here so i remember what brought the biggest heap of spam to break through all the filters.



“To the average joe…blogs aren’t cutting it”…M&G a comment
April 17th, 2007 by nik
A story running on M & G online [to the average joe blogs aren't cutting it April 14] suggests that the blogging phenomenon has perhaps peaked. According to the writer [quoting the agency Technorati]the total number of bloggists in English has remained static at around 24 million bloggers, many of whom are probably duplicate bloggers like myself. The writer also comments [sourly]on the limited number of journalism students who routinely blog and states that it [the writer] has tired of asked for a ‘hands up’ from classes, regarding ‘who blogs?’, because the response is so piss poor. The writer concludes that blogging is a minority occupation. Coincidentally I have also noted that I have encountered very few ‘hands ups’ from anybody who even knows what blogging is, in my own routine probing of the subject over the past few years.
Curiously by contrast ‘click online’ the BBC’s weekly analysis of Internet affairs, headlines, this week, the way that bloggers successfully thwart all Internet attempts at censorship. So while blogging may be a minority activity it is certainly an influential one, influential enough that the mainstream media are desperately appropriating the concept in an attempt to smother its effectiveness..
What is of interest to me however is the idea that the number of bloggists has peaked at around 24 million [English speakers] The writer does refer to another 50 million or so bloggers who write in other languages: these are not of concern to me in this blog. I would be inclined to agree with the M&G writer that blogging could actually be in decline, once one accepts that huge numbers of bloggers are not regular bloggers nor are all bloggers separate individuals, but like myself may well blog under many separate names in different places.
It seems to me though that there could be various reasons why blogging appears to have peaked [or may have peaked] in the English-speaking world: declining levels of literacy, the appropriation of blogging by the mainstream corporatocracy, the loneliness of the random bloggist and the sheer lack of any serious recognition, point, purpose or reward for what is after all a certain amount of intellectual effort.
It is possible that 20 odd million is about the limit of effective literacy in the English speaking world: a world that appears to have been typified by rising levels of Alliteracy over the past couple of decades. Reader surveys seem to have been routinely noting the decline in reading behaviour over the past decades by those beneficiaries of a modern education system. Apparently the US booksellers association reported recently that the number of Americans who admit to reading a novel in 2005 had declined to below 50% for the first time after hovering around the 50% mark for a number of years. Television viewing is the single biggest ‘participatory’ activity in the modern world.
In another report it seems that the 300 million Americans who populate that country only manage to consume 15 million daily newspapers now which is far less that a century ago when there were much fewer people. In South Africa, where this blogger lives, the biggest selling newspaper manages about 250,000 copies a day and one would be hard pressed to call the Daily Sun reading matter, notwithstanding that is a master of the pithy headline. Neither the most serious daily newspaper: Business Day, nor weekly newspaper, The Mail and Guardian can claim much more than 30,000 copies sold each; and even with a modest three readers per copy [a doubtful speculation] 90,000 readers out of a population of some 45 million is readership at its most elitist. The evidence throughout the English speaking world for the decline in reading activity is widely documented and has been happening for some decades now. I have myself written on the subject as far back as 1976.
As an aside comment… Yesterday I stood in a ’round- the-block’ queue for an hour and a half waiting for the licence office in Loveday street [Jozi} to open [ it never did]. I passed the time reading a novel by Carl Hiaasen [Skin Tight, for those who are interested].
Various people around me commented on my strange activity- they simply stood, passively waiting. An old man who was moving up and down the two hundred-metre line of people [selling document folders] told me I was the only person dumb enough to be reading when everyone else was watching out for pickpockets. I did however notice a few people [two] reading one or other of the daily newspapers. The man in front of me was puzzled when I laughed at something I had read, and commented gratuitously, even smugly, accompanied with serious halitosis, that he had never read a thing since he finished school. Other chaps around him agreed that reading was an unhealthy activity- ‘Bad for the eyes’ one said, to general agreement. So much for 25% of the national budget going to educate people in how to stop reading.
When one contrasts all this above evidence with the truism that the most popular activity on the Internet is [apparently] gawping at dirty pictures on a proliferation of porn sites; with the next most common activity being the deletion of spam emails from one’s email account then it is unsurprising that blogging would be an extreme minority activity.
Notwithstanding this, blogging has proved to be a potent force for prising apart the insidious grip of the mainstream media’s ‘gate-keeping’ function. Bloggers tell that part of the world that cares, about the other ways in which the news may be interpreted, whether real, quirky, fictional, self indulgent or fiercely accurate.
For this reason the Mainstream media are striking back and blogging has been appropriated by almost all worthy media as a way of reinforcing corporate messages using the blind credibility that blogging has acquired. In effect the corporate response to the Blog phenomena has been to attach Blogging to the Public Relations function that so powerfully attempts to mould opinion to conform to corporate needs and wants. In this way ‘authoritive’ voices can be given media supported space to crowd out the more ‘hysterical’ messages of the independent blogger.
Which gives us the third element that must inevitably crowd out the independent voice: The loneliness of the long distance Internet. Anyone who has attempted to present a message on the World Wide Web knows that the experience is similar, in a way, to what would happen if one farted on the centre line of a crowded football stadium. Perhaps a few people nearby might get the message about the state of one’s bowels but the vast mass of the gathered crowd would remain oblivious.
I routinely use the Internet, and specifically Google, for teaching purposes with my classes at the high school where I facilitate the learning of business practice. For instance I may start with a fun statement like ‘business games’: a request to Google that will pull 300 million pages of choices. Given that each page contains 10 entries that is THREE BILLION choices available at the press of a button. We keep refining the question until we find a game, for instance, that is appropriate to what we are studying. Even then our choices run to the thousands.
The random bloggist is lost with such choice. The core problem of the Internet has always been ‘How does one target the untargetable’. To date the best solution is Google and that is hardly a solution.
So inevitably the random bloggist who forms a part of that amorphous 20 million odd bloggers allegedly out there stating their purpose will operate without pay in an environment where they will be lucky if they can attract a few hundred readers. And these readers are so spoilt for choice that they will soon move on in search of greater novelty.
At best blogging is a self-indulgent activity that seeks no reward other than the knowledge that like Kilroy ‘they were there’ and have some small measure of fame in an elusive fame-free world and this must be the ultimate minority activity. Why spend time writing something that almost no one will ever read or even care about.
And as for journalism students blogging on the web, I also suspect that blogging could only be a ancillary activity for such journalism students who choose to operate without editorial control; which is hardly something a good journalism school would teach would they?
The essence of blogging is founded in taking the initiative to say what one wants to say without any form of interference from anyone at all- These are my undiluted, unmediated words, and fuck you if you don’t like what I say. There are no advertisers to offend, no vested interests to protect, and no subtextural hidden agendas to covertly promote. The very idea that journalism students should be practiced Bloggers is almost a complete contradiction of their terms of [future] employment. Too much independence would compromise their employment potential as ‘Hacks’ to the corporatocracy. Aah but then I am ignoring the fact aren’t I that the corporate blogs That have appropriated our invention are probably as carefully edited and proofread as any piece of writing that goes in a piece of mainstream media. If a blog has a corporate logo it can be sued.
Ultimately when one thinks about the problem of figuring out how to say something coherent enough to be read by a third party without an editorial intermediary; and then being able to do this consistently, for no financial reward, to an ultimately indifferent, jaded, communication saturated, marginally committed reader, with an eight word attention span, then we know that what is really surprising is that there are as many as 24 million of us at all.
Viva Bloggers.
Category : Uncategorized
3 Responses to ““To the average joe…blogs aren’t cutting it”…M&G a comment”
kchasu, on April 17th, 2007 at 11:19 am Said:
I was talking to a seasoned PR person the other day. He is terribly out of touch with any actual work, or the Internet for that matter.
Nevertheless he is telling his clients that his agency will set up blogs for them.
I was pissed off. Who the hell are they kidding? Would any of us on here read anything that was blatantly advertising of one sort or another?
No.
And PR is my business. But blogs or chatrooms are no place for it. i used to think they might be. but they are not. the small population that is literate enough to produce online, is not going to be influenced by that kind of crap. therefore, for me, this blog is the last outpost of civilisation.
i see Duncan Mcleod has started a blog. it’s press releases!!!! i know this, because we send him some. and there is a big fuss made because this journo “launches a blog”. crap.
utter shite.
corporates are the politicians of this century in terms of propaganda. it’s fine. but they don’t understand the Internet. they just see a medium and can’t believe they can’t use it.
i immediately steer clients away from “corporate blogging”. it will be a monstrous mess. they would be flamed. it’s harmful.
brandon96end, on April 18th, 2007 at 6:47 am Said:
Unless you have a cpative audience and a really articulate person handling the blog, it can just become a mess… even then, a blog is not the place to advertise. Unless, of course, you can back everything up… all the time.
Данил, on December 3rd, 2008 at 12:32 am Said:
Very useful and informative text !