Nurturing and death in Web 2.0

I thought I’d just try it, see what happens to myself when I don’t post for a while. Although it isn’t that interesting for the readers of a blog, you should definitely try it. Because when a blog becomes a McLuhanesque fixed charge in your life, the only way to see what has changed is to disconnect from it. As you can see, it didn’t last that long before I just couldn’t resist to get back to my blog and write down my thoughts and experiences in this post.

Jean-François Berthet made an entry about blogs being like a Tamagotchi on his 365questions.org blog. You name your blog, you shape its form, you could perhaps say you are making a reflection of yourself. Even more than on social networking sites, where the emphasis is more on presentation to your friends. It a reflection of yourself. The sight of a your poor blog with its last message a month ago is almost a heartbreaking experience. In your mind you’re constantly making excuses to the blog like: ‘I’ll post tomorrow’, ‘Sorry blog, I have a writersblock!’ ‘No post today blog, I’m busy.’

This reflection, also on social networking sites, will some day stop. Although a macaber thought, it will surely stop on the day you die. Recent examples are the Myspace profiles of the people killed at Virginia tech, a list containing most of their Myspace profiles can be found at The West Virginia Blogger. A recent example closer to my home is the Hyves page of Gerd-Nan van Wijk, who got beaten and died when leaving his school in Alkmaar. The reflection once created as an enviroment to be nurtured, is now freeze-framed in time. Like a watch that stopped ticking, the virtual spaces stopped moving only leaving the traces of (virtual) friends sending you condolences.

But how about when I stop blogging? Could that be the infamous Death of the Blogger? When the blogger gives up on the blog, is it the blog that dies? And when a blogger dies, is it the blog that lives on, providing a virtual space for condoleances? Could we say that firstly when the blogger dies, the audience adresses the blog. And secondly that when the blog dies, the audience adresses the blogger.

The question we can indirectly ask here is: Who are you blogging for? Perhaps not specifically an imagined audience, perhaps not even yourself but the technology you gave a character. An external agent you set up as a medium between yourself an your imagined audience. An agent that will survive your day and will exist as an in memoriam, but still not being yourself. This also brings me to another question that has been keeping me busy since I started blogging: How long will data stay?

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Talking about ‘Fans, Bloggers and Gamers’

For the Masters of Media blog at the University of Amsterdam fellow student Roman did a Podcast on Henry Jenkins‘ new book Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture and he called me up to talk about it. Got to love those vintage phonelines and the aesthetics of Podcasts!

You can check it out in this blogpost, or you can download the ‘Discussing Jenkins’ Podcast directly from here. And since we’re talking about bloggers here, check out what other blogs say about it here, here and here. The first link includes an interesting interview with Jenkins.

Disrupt Technorati

This next thing is an interesting initiative. Make a blogpost and link as many people to disrupt -or maybe you could call it hack- Technorati’s ranking system. It’s like the Google bomb for blogs, and why shouldn’t we participate in such an initiative to check out what it does, right? It would be interesting to see what happens if this thing grows big. Web statistics would become less reliable.

Although I’m not sure if this idea is original, I got this through Laurence-Hélène’s blog and the initiator Mark Collier’s Viral Garden blog. eMarketeer Seth Godin also made a post about this, and his list looks different already from the list that I have posted below. To read how this works here is a part of the how-to from Mark Collier’s post Revenge of the ‘Z-Lister’:

What YOU can do is simply create a new post on your blog, but CUT AND PASTE the list I have below, and then ADD any blogs you feel aren’t getting their due either. It can be 1 blog, or a hundred(or none if you simply want to repost the same list), but the idea is, find those great blogs that, for whatever reason, you feel aren’t getting their due, link-wise.
Then after you leave your post, the next blogger will do the same thing, cut and paste YOUR list, and add THEIR blogs to the list, then repost it. Add the same instructions in your post that the next blogger should cut and paste YOUR list, and add any blogs they feel should be on it to THEIR list. The list will get increasingly long, and all the blogs will get a sort of reverse ‘pyramid-affect’ of link-love.

This is the infamous list:
Creative Think / Soloride / Movie Marketing Madness / Blog Till You Drop! / Get Shouty! / One Reader at a Time / The New PR / Own Your Brand! / OTOInsights / bizandbuzz / Work, in Plain English / Buzz Canuck / New Millenium PR / Pardon My French / Troy Worman’s Blog / The Instigator Blog / AENDirect / Diva Marketing / Marketing Hipster / The Marketing Minute / Funny Business / The Frager Factor / Mindblob / Open The Dialogue / Word Sell / Note to CMO: / That’s Great Marketing! / Shotgun Marketing Blog / BrandSizzle / bizsolutionsplus / Customers Rock! / Being Peter Kim / Billions With Zero Knowledge / Working at Home on the Internet / MapleLeaf 2.0 / darrenbarefoot.com / Two Hat Marketing / The Emerging Brand / The Branding Blog / CrapHammer / Drew’s Marketing Minute / Golden Practices / Viaspire / Tell Ten Friends / Flooring the Consumer / Kinetic Ideas / Unconventional Thinking / Buzzoodle / NewsPaperGrl / The Copywriting Maven / Hee-Haw Marketing / Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn / Multi-Cult Classics / Logic + Emotion / Branding & Marketing / Popcorn n Roses / On Influence & Automation / Bullshitobserver / Servant of Chaos / converstations / eSoup / Presentation Zen / Dmitry Linkov / aialone / John Wagner / Nick Rice / CKs Blog / Design Sojourn / Frozen Puck / The Sartorialist / Small Surfaces / Africa Unchained / Perspective / gDiapers / Marketing Nirvana / Bob Sutton / ¡Hola! Oi! Hi! / Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid! / Women, Art, Life: Weaving It All Together / Community Guy / Social Media on the fly / Jeremy Latham’s Blog / SMogger Social Media Blog / Masey.com / New Media Wanderings / Return on Innovation / T’s Melange / Masters of Media