Bloggasm

Ok, about a million people have told me that the picture of me on the right-hand side makes me look like an indifferent asshole. I tried to shrug it off, but another two people within the last 24 hours have told me I should change it. I tried to explain to them that I’ve put on about 10 pounds since that picture, so it wouldn’t do well to feed my ego, but they were unrelenting.

Alright already, I’ll try to get around to taking a new picture and posting it this weekend. Does anyone know how to use Photoshop?

I’m not a regular listener of talk radio, but I’ve always wondered why they use a one-person format. It seems like they could keep the conversation going more smoothly if a talk radio host had another host to talk to. To me, it just seems so unnatural for a guy to basically talk to himself for hours straight; the few times I have listened to the medium I noticed that there seems to be no flow.

I’m currently reading an article about right-wing radio that was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly. It’s written by David Foster Wallace and is titled “Host.” Now, I usually hate it when bloggers simply block quote huge chunks of text, but I really need to in this instance.

In this particular passage, Wallace describes the difficulty of being a talk radio host:

To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want — with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential — a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying — which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking. Plus, ideally, what you’re saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself — your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you’re discussing. And it gets even trickier: You’re trying to communicate in real time with someone you cannot see or hear responses from; and though you’re communicating in speech, your remarks cannot have any of the fragmentary repetitive, garbled qualities of real interhuman speech or speech’s ticcy pauses while you try to think of how to phrase what you want to say next. You’re also, of course, denied the physical inflections that are so much a part of spoken English — the facial expressions, changes in posture, and symphony of little gestures that accompany and buttress real talking. Everything unspoken about you, your topic, and how you feel about it has to be conveyed through pitch, volume, tone, and pacing. The pacing is especially important: it can’t be too slow, since that’s low-energy and dull, but it can’t be too rushed or it will sound like babbling. And so you have somehow to keep all these different imperatives and structures in mind at the same time, while also filling exactly, say, eleven minutes, with no dead air and no going over, such that at 10:46 you have wound things up neatly and are in a position to say, “KFI is the station with the most frequent traffic reports. Alan LaGreen is in the KFI Traffic Center” (which, to be honest, Mr. Z. sometimes leaves himself only three or even two seconds for and has to say extremely fast, which he can always do without a flub). So then, ready: go.

Excerpted from The New Kings of Nonfiction

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For about a year now, there has been a profusion of Facebook groups titled “1,000,000 strong for [insert cause].” E.g., there’s one group called “1,000,000 Strong For Stephen T Colbert.”

Only this example is different from all others because of one simple fact: It actually has over a million readers.

Seriously people, quit it already. If you type “1,000,000 strong” into Facebook’s search field, you’ll find 500+ groups that use it in the title. And out of all those groups, only one has reached the goal.

By giving yourself such a grandiose title, you’re actually diminishing the effect of your cause. For instance, let’s say your group reaches 10,000 people — that’s a pretty sizable number of supporters– a group that big has clout. But the way the group has been framed, it comes out looking like a loser, a lost cause.

The reason I’m talking about this is because today I happened across a group called “1,000,000 Fans Strong for Striking Writers.” Now, I may be wrong, but I would warrant a guess that there aren’t even more than 1 million facebook members who know anything really substantial about the strike. In other words, there may be a lot who know that a strike exists — but people who are actually following the story?

So what are the chances that you’ll find 1 million facebook members who not only follow the story, but care enough to join the group? Not very good. In fact, the group has been up for a few days now and it has amassed fewer than a thousand members.

So even if this group managed to pull in, say, 50,000 people, it still looks like a failure — it’s a PR nightmare because it creates the illusion that people aren’t supporting the writer’s strike.

Several people have already begun to mock this “1 million strong” trend, including one guy who created a (now deleted) group called “If this group gets 20 people my girlfriend will fuck a horse.”

Indeed.

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Well, Bloggasm has made it onto Instapundit and Fark today, so hopefully my servers will be able to take the onslaught. When I made it onto the front page of Digg awhile back the site started crashing for about an hour, but so far today the website has loaded smoothly.

In a column published in InformationWeek, blogger/journalist/sf novelist Cory Doctorow argues that as Facebook becomes more popular, it becomes much more useless. The very ubiquity of it devalues the power of social networking.

“For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy,” he writes, “or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, ‘Am I your friend?’ yes or no, this instant, please.”

Doctorow notes that as social networks become more popular, another one springs up for new users to flock to. First there was friendster, and then the users migrated to Myspace, and now they’re leaving Myspace in droves to sign up for Facebook. If his argument is to be believed, then at some point, Facebook will become too crowded — standing room only — and we will need to move on to some other outlet in order for our social networking to become more efficient.

It was only a few hours after I finished reading the column that I realized how true his argument was.

I logged into my email account and was dismayed to see that I had an email from Facebook telling me I had been invited to an “event.” The event was a production put on by a gay and lesbian group at the university from which I graduated in 2006. The person who sent me the invitation (she shall remain nameless) was a friend of a former roommate of mine. She and I had exchanged small talk at a few parties, and at some point one of us had friended the other. But I wouldn’t consider her a “friend” in the real world, and I certainly haven’t communicated with her since I’ve stopped living with that former roommate.

This hasn’t stopped her from spamming me on multiple occasions with invitations to events, usually put on by the before-mentioned gay and lesbian group. It’s very obvious that she merely sends the same invitation to every person on her friendslist. At first, I reacted to these invitations with indifference, clicking on the “not attending” button and then moving on with my life. By about the third time, I began to get annoyed — mainly because Facebook, in its quest to suck in page views, makes you log in to the site just to reject an invitation (it’s like you’re getting double-spammed–once in email, then once in Facebook).

By the time I logged in today, that annoyance had turned into outright anger. “Who the hell does she think she is?” I thought. “Does she have no respect for the people who were nice enough to have friended her? Is she so egotistical that she feels that she has the privilege of spamming every Dick and Jane she knows?”

It was at this point that I realized that this person really had no social value to me at all — in fact she had a negative social value. In this particular instance, social networking was a detriment; a “friend” had betrayed my trust and stepped over the line.

With this realization, I did what I have rarely done before: I removed her from my friendslist.

She will not be the last. I feel like I’ve somehow broken the floodgates. And there’s this other guy I had “friended” in college who I only knew because I had seen him at a few parties and we happened to share a class. Though I no longer live in my college town, I still get regular invites to parties he and his roommates (as a side note, why the hell hasn’t he graduated?) are throwing. With this newfound freedom on my part, he’ll be promptly deleted from my list the next time I find a piece of spam from him in my inbox.

When will this mass deletion stop? With the introduction of facebook apps, this may only be the beginning. How many times do I need to get superpoked before you’re in the deletion bin? There’s only one way to find out.

I’ll end this post with an anecdote: During my senior year in college, I met several freshman who said they had over 100 facebook friends from the university before their first day of school. That’s right, these incoming freshman would go on facebook and maniacally friend every halfway-attractive person, accumulating a mass of useless social networks that would merely cloud their newsfeeds.

Tell me: If you’ve friended 500 people you’ve never met, never corresponded with, or never intend to talk to, then what does that tell you about your real-life, face-to-face social networking?

It tells me that you’re about as shallow as they come.

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::BARF::

Some particularly gag-inducing lines:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all writers are NOT treated equal; that some are undeservedly endowed by their university or publishing house with a certain level of haughty privilege; and that in the literary world we are entitled to a Byline, Publication and pursuit of an Audience.

And this:

This small press is in direct opposition to the mentality of our current cultural climate, both in the mainstream world of slick televised “reality” and pop music made by machines with pre-disintegrated The Tyrant’s Foe, The People’s Friend.components, easily sold and easily reproduced ad nauseam, to the large press of university magazines staffed by editors publishing grant recipients, workshop geniuses and other university magazine editor’s obscure verse designed to puzzle and stymie the very people poetry is supposed to affect most.

Meanwhile, their daddies cough up another $40,000 in tuition a year while they suffer for their art.

Added bonus: More puking:

fringeLIT is an online literary journal devoted to up and coming writers with vision and skill. We publish work demonstrating raw energy and timelessness. We want work that is alive. This is a venue for serious writers frustrated with the tastes of the academic literary establishment.

I know one of the guys who regularly writes for this publication — I went to college with him. He started a year after me and is now close to going on his sixth year. His parents pay his tuition and he takes all of 12 credits a semester and then complains to everyone he knows about how hard school is.

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The Editor’s Weblog is reporting that the Guardian’s online readership has surpassed that of the New York Times. “With 18.4 million users in October,” it said, “the Guardian was ahead of nytimes.com, which registered 17.5 million users in the same period, according to Nielsen / NetRatings.”

This would be very shocking indeed, except there were two separate metrics to measure those audiences. For the Times, the blogger referred to Nielse/NetRatings, which generally seems to underrate a website’s traffic. For the Guardian, the blogger used ABC Electronic figures.

Traffic metrics are already debatable on an individual basis, so I think it would be silly to even try comparing traffic figures from two different sources.

Either way, even if the Guardian’s online readership is even close to that of the Times, what does this say about U.S. hegemony? Or rather, what does it say about our news coverage?

via buzz machine

UPDATE: I didn’t realize this at the time of posting, but Nielsen metrics only measure the U.S. audience, so it didn’t account for any readers overseas.

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