Made out of people

Blogs and Personality

I'll have to think about this issue for a little while. Last Wednesday evening, I met Howard Rheingold for the first time. He's an old friend of my future boss and with Barry and so he had some members of the Netlab and I over to dinner. Howard and I spend some time deep-thinking about blogs, wikis, group and individual editing -- it's all out there in a post that I will try to write shortly.

That evening, I sent out the post that said that Microsoft had officially hired me, and shortly thereafter I got an email from Howard:

Didn't realize yesterday that your blog has been on my aggregator for a
while!

How odd ... Howard Rheingold has been reading my blog for a while. I met him, we talked, and he had no idea who I was. His explanation was that

RSS does tend to remove the personality from blogs and strip it down to
the content of the entries.

which isn't false, but something is missing. The great marvel of blogs over (for example) Usenet is that while Usenet is topic-oriented, blogs are author-oriented. I read a blog because I believe the author (or authors) has something distinctive to say to me. Some of them I choose due to point of view, such as political blogs; others I choose by topic area (Many2Many); others by friendship.

In all of them, though, I thought that I was looking for Authorial Voice. If I want random discussion of a topic, after all, there's Slashdot and Metafilter and--yes--Usenet. But if I want to follow the quirks of a particular person, I hit their blog.

But in that case, something is going horribly wrong if authorial voice is lost in the RSS feed. Am I just one part of a greater link filter, or a slightly more-profound idea-filter? Is, in other words, Howard producing his very own Slashdot (or New York Times) in which lots of anonymous articles bubble up, to be read and contemplated and, once in a while, the writer pokes through? This suggests that the "distinctive" hypothesis is wrong.

Instead, perhaps, consider the "seal of quality" hypothesis. My name on my blog isn't so much my voice, but instead my promise that all my entries are up to my own standards. They trivially are, of course: I wrote them. (Not universally true: Lawrence Lessig brings on a slew of guest bloggers.) So rather than trusting a single paper ("The New York Times") to do the editing, Howard (or my hypothetical reader) is trusting me to do my editing, and is giving up the shared editorial voice that something like the Times gives you.

The analogy runs slightly false, here: for one, the Times doesn't quite offer my blog, in all it's bloggy goodness. This is it. Your only source for "Made Out Of People." For another, and this is the worrisome question, the question that could keep me up at night, were I to let it--why does Howard trust me to edit a blog, but doesn't know me well enough to know if I write it?

Or am I just reading too much into the story of a guy with a few hundred RSS feeds?

What I'm wrestling with here is the question of what it means to author a (non-journal, not-necessarily-personal) blog.