There Is No Cat

Run for the hills! AOL is coming!

Shelley Powers notes the buzz around the impending release of AOL’s blogging system, and in particular the reactions from current bloggers fearing what the influx of AOLers will do to the pristine environment of Blogistan, taking particular note of what happened when AOL loosed hundreds of thousands of participants on Usenet. (I have to note that Shelley favors the changes she sees.)

I was around for Permanent September, as the AOLization of Usenet was known. I don’t remember it fondly. AOL’s software was buggy, so for a while, every time someone from aol.com posted, you would see something like eight copies of each message. The users were completely unaware of the culture of Usenet, and stomped all over the delicate balance that had emerged over the years. About the only good thing I can think of is that after aol.com became the domain name commonly associated with clueless idiots, everyone forgot that the previous holder of that distinction was psu.edu.

That said, Usenet != Blogistan. I don’t think the impact will be nearly as severe, or in fact, negative at all. Blogistan is already much larger than any one person or cabal can get their heads around. There are hundreds of thousands of Blogspot weblogs, Radio weblogs, and LiveJournals that are maintained by people who already have no idea who Jeff Jarvis, Meg Hourihan, Nick Denton, Anil Dash, and Clay Shirky are. There are already different settlements here; tech blogs, warblogs, etc., etc. ad infinitum. The "a-listers" are already only "famous" within a relatively small segment of Blogistan’s residents. The coming of AOL will change this in degree, but not in nature.

The other thing is that the nature of Usenet and Blogistan are very different. Usenet is subject-centric, and generally read in threads. You select those subjects within a newsfroup that interest you, and you read those. Within a newsreader, there’s very little scope for differentiating between posts by different members of the group; maybe you can highlight posts from one person, kill posts from another, but that’s about it. The focus is on the subject, not the person, and the tools encourage reading all posts on a given subject. In this ecosystem, it’s very easy for newbies to break into the conversation, and possibly even disrupt the ecosystem, as the introduction of AOL to Usenet did.

Blogistan, on the other hand, is person-centric. A blog is the product of a single person or group of people. The tools for threading conversations are quite primitive in comparison to Usenet. Many (most?) blogs don’t have a commenting mechanism, although it’s more prevalent than in the early days. Most blogs with commenting mechanisms lack the critical mass to create a steady community and therefore get few if any comments. Very few of the comment sections on blogs are threaded, and those that are are typically difficult to follow. (It’s certainly possible to read Usenet in a non-threaded manner; the command line client rn did this. But Usenet makes more sense in threads, such as displayed in rn’s descendent, trn.) Rather than throwing everyone into a soup the way Usenet does, Blogistan is an archipelago of islands, and the bridges between them can be hard to build. It’s not easy to break into the conversation just by posting something to your own site. Trackback, which is intended to address that shortcoming, feels bolted on to the side of most websites where it’s used rather than integrated into the flow of what little conversation most blogs generate. It’s very easy to ignore people you don’t know in Blogistan; in fact, it’s the default. If you don’t know about a blog, you can’t read it. Shelley hopes the introduction of AOLers into Blogistan will lead to "complete and utter anarchy". But that’s what we’ve already got.

In short, most AOL bloggers will likely be voices in the wilderness, just like most other bloggers today. Certainly a few stars will emerge. Some of them may even be disruptive to current social patterns. There may be a bit more balkanization than there is now. But the overall impact is likely to be minimal, because the "noise" of a million or five cheese sandwich blogs doesn’t impact the ability of the widely-read bloggers to communicate the way it does on Usenet. I don’t see the AOLization of Blogistan as being anything but more of the same. And that’s fine by me.

Posted at 4:21 AM