Digital Common Sense

Because random is really what I do best, here’s some randomness…

Posting here has been light and random of late. When I say of late, I really mean for the last several months. That said, the next couple of weeks will be light. I’m off to California for a high school reunion and to visit family. My focus is away from blogging and the net. And yes, I’ll have two laptops, a Blackberry and a cell phone with me. All quite capable of net stuff. But my focus will be elsewhere. You, my dear readers (all three of you), are important to me, but reality in the real world is more important. And all three of you know that already.

Ok, that was self deprecating, because I know there are actually more than three of you. I also know that those of you I exchange email, comments or conversation with know that real life is more important because you continually demonstrate your engagement with those more important real life things yourselves. For all of us, reality is more important that what happens online, although more and more I see folks I’ve read and talked to acting like the net is actually important.

Blogging. Tagging. A-list. Linking. The pecking order in the school yard. That’s how important it all is. All the blogging foofooraw is almost as important as being picked first for kickball on the playground back so many years ago. And it saddens me to see so many people I like and respect placing so much emphasis, or more importantly burning so many brain cells, over something so unimportant.

This realization has saddened me in a way that I can’t truly share here. Well, I can but I won’t. But I will explain. My blogroll over on the right side really represents two things. First and foremost, there’s my personal A-list…A for Affinity. Those are folks I feel some kinship with for a variety of reasons. Friends, co-workers, people I’ve developed a kinship with online. But I’ve been pretty involved in this blog crap since 2001 really. And I’ve seen people go from unknown strangers, to regular reads, to online friends of sorts to irrelevant, to annoying, to gone. My blogroll rarely openly denotes that. But I’ve noticed it personally as I weed people out of my RSS aggregator. That’s where it’s noticeable. Someone mentions Scoble and I realize I quit reading him a long time ago because regardless of what the noise says, he hasn’t said anything I found relevant in a long time. Noise for the sake of noise. I like Robert. I like him a lot when he blogs the human side of Robert. But that faded away and he became just another shrill voice shrieking the party line. Blogging isn’t hot. It isn’t a phenomena. Tags don’t matter. Microsoft is irrelevant (sorry Bill, but your big megalithic company is as irrelevant as AT&T was in 1998). Big companies, like elephants, just take a while to die.

Robert isn’t alone, and my singling him out wasn’t personal. There are a lot of what have been, over time, highly visible, highly respected folks that I’ve read. Many I’ve had personal conversations with. Some I know in person…yes, real life, who’ve become just irrelevant. And I know it will annoy some of you to read it, but get over the Cluetrain. The train derailed long ago. I’m sorry but folks, the trains has left the station. It’s long gone. It’s off the tracks. It’s history. And repeating the same shrill message years later is preaching to the choir. And some of us choir members are just sick of hearing the same sad tune, even if it’s some new convert who drank the koolaid singing. No I won’t name names, but how many of you have heard the same, offtimes shrill. voices, singing the same tune, repeating the same message, for just too damn long. Think stupid network. Think cluetrain. Think the market is the message. I’m sorry, but dammit, y’all gor boring as heck and haven’t said anything worth listening too for too damn long. Now if you say something interesting, I’ll have to hear it somewhere else because you’ve driven me to quit listening to your spouting the same crap day in and day out.

What pleases me far more, is the new encounters. Finding Tommi’s blog through the coincidental connection with Mary. Leaping from there on to Six More Months, where I read every day, but realize he hasn’t even made my blogroll here (shame on me…fixing that now). Learning today that a co-worker I respect greatly wandered the net and found my humble site here completely unknown to me was more exciting than inciting the /.-ers to link for me personally.

I’ve read a lot lately, too much, about men linking men (again…yawn), A-listers giving charity links to newcomers, ratings and rankings (rapings and pillaging?), ad nauseum. I don’t read your blogroll any more. I doubt you read mine. Where do I find new people to read? I wander comment links. Some of the people who read this draw comments in from far and wide sources. I look to see who read something on Shelley’s blog. I follow a link to a commenter’s blog. Then follow a comment to a link on their blog.

Think of the old six degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon game. Or Will Smith if you liked the movie. I find myself, in my spare reading time, trying to reach 4 to 6 degrees of separation away to find someone new. And there are lots of somone new-s out there.

Is there a reason for this? I’m not sure. The blog circle has become so inbred, so nepotistic, so closed that I find it terribly unappealing once I cross past my small affinity group circle. For me, when I read, I go looking for new and interesting. And the people who once were interesting (I started listing names, but respect drove me to backspace) are often boring now. I don’t take enough time to point to new voices, or link to them. To me, it’s becoming more important to interact with them. Comments, email, and sometimes blog posts, but the blogging bubble has burst. The next big thing in blogging will not be blogging. We have passed the apogee folks, but we’re not in orbit, and this time, what goes around isn’t coming back around.

We need to think about new things.

Filed by Ken at 7:29 pm under General