Monday, December 13, 2004

+ Wait - Can't

Dave: Sometime pretty soon (praise Murphy) we'll ship an open source (GPL) outliner that knows OPML and the Web very well.

Sad ending

I just learned that David Brudnoy, one of the great radio talk show hosts, long a fixture on WBZ/1030 in Boston has died. My first assumption was AIDS, which nearly took him down a decade ago, but instead it was cancer. He was 64. Two excellent tributes on the link above, plus this one from Andrew Sullivan.

Among the biggest plankton in the ocean

The one and only time I ever brought a laptop into our pool was when Newsweek came to shoot the photo at the top of The Alpha Bloggers, an essay by Steven Levy in the current Enterprise edition of the magazine.

The piece has been in the mill for awhile. (Thanks to Steve Rubel for being the first to let me know it was up online.) I think my quotes in it were gleaned from a phone conversation with Steven during one of my trips back and forth to the Bay Area last month. For a short while early this month there were plans to shoot another photo for the cover of the edition, but they decided to go with something more business-y. I don't blame them.

For what it's worth, I've never thought of myself as an "A-list" blogger, and I've disliked the distinction ever since I first heard it uttered.

I was on academic and social Z-lists from kindergarten through college. Lemme tell you, there's nothing like belonging to an out caste to give you a lifelong disdain for all caste systems, even if they're just one way among many to make sense of a complex topic (which is what we have with this A-list blogger stuff, and why I think this piece by Steven is a good one).

One of the reasons certain bloggers are popular, I suspect, is that the blogosphere isn't high school. Coolness might cause a few links; but most links come either from having something interesting to say, or from passing along something interesting that somebody else has said.

I've been doing some of both since 1999, which is why this blog is now graced with enough inbound links put it in Technorati's Top 100.

But let's also remember that Technorati follows close to 5 million blogs. And that David Sifry (also quoted by Steven) has stats showing that the vast bulk of links happen amidst members of "The Long Tail".

With few exceptions, bloggers are individuals. Jounalistically speaking, they're single-celled animals. Being an alpha blogger is therefore akin to being an alpha amoeba, or an alpha paramecium.

I don't mean that as a put-down of blogging; but rather as a way of getting some perspective on what "alpha" means in a 'bet that's seven figures long, and runs horizontally, not vertically.