The Star You Are

David Weinberger and I were coming back from a meeting I'd set up for him, not that he couldn't have done it himself, but we had a conversation about why the folks were willing to meet with us and ended like this, "You're famous," he said to me. I hated the idea. "No, I'm not," I said, "if anyone is, you are. Not me!" I told him. "You are," he insisted. I still disagreed.

David and I met when he needed help editing the book he was writing two years ago, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" and I was finishing up some projects helping people write, edit, shape book manuscripts. We became friends. We would meet in Chinese restaurants -- actually one Chinese restaurant in Brookline -- and I would give him my notes on his chapters. Were we famous? No. He was better known for sure than I was then, if we have to discuss degrees of alleged "fame" but I only thought of him as my friend. I thought of us as just two people having lunch in a Chinese restaurant -- one writer trying to help out another writer.

Is there an "A List" of Bloggers? Are they famous? Are they stars? This notion is swirling around the ETech Conference in San Diego this week -- that there is an elite set of bloggers and that they are an exclusive community, perhaps not receptive to less "famous" folks' desire to engage in conversation or discussion or dinner with them. It's really a complicated issue.

I think you must examine two things to begin with. First of all you have to define what blogging is as a medium. Then you have to open the larger conversation about what social software is and in particular the social network software of which Friendster, LINKEDIN and Orkut are examples.

As for what blogging is, you could say at one end of the spectrum, blogs are simply online journals. But you might go to the other extreme and agree with what Alan Webber of FastCompany Magazine once told me, "Blogging is performance art." It's not the definition everyone would use, but it points to something important about this "fame" discussion. It would be a lie to say we aren't trying to draw attention to our sites, our selves, our writing here on our blogs. I'll personally take Joi Ito to task on this point. When he posts pictures with him, his fiance and Steven Spielberg on his site -- come on, Joi, get real, you can't say this is to make you look like Joe Regular Guy or Mr. UnFamous, right? He and I have talked about this stuff. And I would say I'm guilty of the same name-dropping and "guess where I've been and what cool people I'm hanging out with" blogging. Still, when we are at a conference, we have our friends there and since we rarely get to all be in one place at one time, perhaps the time we spend with them can look exclusionary of others. I'm waffling here, unwilling to say we were snobby or we were justified in our behavior, but I can see it from both sides. It's hard to explain what it feels like when you just want to talk to 3 friends, but 30 strangers also want to talk to you. And you know those 30 might be equally fascinating, pleasant, and articulate but there are THIRTY of them.

There's another subtle level to it. Joi Ito the person and Joi Ito the blog are different. Halley (me in my skin here) and Halley's Comment Halley are different. When we take our bodies for a visit to a conference and we meet with our friends who we chat with, email with, blog and comment with, we are being ourselves mostly. But people are also reacting to us as our blog performance art persona. It messes with your mind.

I was at the Bloggercon event last October and at San Diego for ETech this first week of February. Something has changed in the world of bloggers since October. It may be the fact that blogging is getting much more attention in the national media and that many more blogs have been set up and there's a larger community now, but the effect Clay Shirky had forecast seems to be happening, i.e., due to power law distribution, many more bloggers makes a few very very famous.

A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we've seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.

Now, notice if I'd said "the effect Clay had forecast" instead of "the effect Clay Shirky had forecast" -- the former obviously makes it sound like Clay's my big buddy and we're in the same social circle, the latter merely a conventional attribution to an original source by the writer's name. This small omission makes all the difference. In fact, I have not met Clay, so it didn't seem appropriate to suggest that proximity.
It's not unimportant to note that the claims by some folks attending or hearing about the ETech Conference that there was an elitist and exclusive parading around of the so-called A-List bloggers, comes right on the heels of the big brou-ha-ha over Orkut, a new social software network.

To return to the format and intent of my essay mentioned above -- define blogs and then define social network software like Friendster, LINKEDIN and Orkut. At their best, these social networks, collections of people's names and profiles that supposedly facilitate community, give members the chance to make contacts for work, fun, family. At their worst, they are one more lame attempt to name and categorize who's cool and who's not. That "cool" game, and privacy issues, were the reasons I did not join Orkut. I don't like that kind of exclusive club. I haven't used Orkut so I have no right to criticize it, but it feels just like the local country club that won't invite jews, blacks or women, depending on the decade.

If there's any justified fame to be found here on blogs, it should be a "fame of talent." If you write well and people value your writing, that should be the beginning and the end of it. That people want to see, study, talk with, flirt with, drink with, point at, dance with our real live blogger selves is something else entirely.

The place I find interesting is where the two overlap and create disappointment -- where blogs and social networks create a false zone of "intimacy" -- making all parties feel they really "know" one another. Perhaps when we gather together in the real world, there's a sense that if we've played and chatted in Orkut or IRC, read the most personal details of a blogger's life and have had one another's email addresses in our address books for years, we should have equally intimate access to those same people in the lobby of the hotel. As many have written lately, social webs are just a lot more complicated than that and very hard to reduce into a flat software app, and as we stumble our way along, we'll have to watch social network software evolve and take on some of the complexity of real life relationships, or vanish from the scene.