A couple days ago, Valleywag poked some fun at Seth Goldstein’s latest blog entry for being devoid of ‘earthly meaning.’ Which I thought was great, because that same day I started writing this post, which originally began with the sentence “Seth Goldstein is being more clear and concise than usual on his blog.” I’m not sure what that says about me, or Seth, or Valleywag. I think I’ve got a higher tolerance for neologisms than the ‘wag does.
But yes, Seth’s latest post is worth reading. Summing up quickly – we get attention (readership, say – you’re paying attention to me right now) from a variety of sources, and we track the attention through more and more revealing tools (MyBlogLog, FeedBurner, MeasureMap, etc.) This increased insight into our own audience inevitably affects what we write. And then here’s the money quote:
“It is no longer quite so simple as writing about something and then waiting for people to show up who are interested in the subject of the post. Now, many of you often show up in advance, announcing your interests immediately. If I dont satisfy your expectations for certain insights while I have your Attention, then I will lose it to other feeds. Without your Attention, the writing likely stops. And without the writing, so goes this blog which is a big part of my online identity.”
This is great in that it’s honest – Seth, myself, and most of the people I read aren’t writing just for the inherent satisfaction of the act, but because we want to get something out of it (‘without your Attention, the writing likely stops.’) Money, fame, sex, power – pick your motivation. Which isn’t new – people have been writing with a purpose since there’s been writing. But the real-time feedback we’re getting through our various monitoring tools is new. We can adapt to our readership as soon as they show, feeding them chunks of content more in-line with their interests. Which is why Seth then lost me a bit when he wrote:
“One way of putting it then is that the stability of my identity is tied to having access to your Attention statistics.”
I’d sooner argue that the instability of your online identity is tied to having access to this rich readership information. As your online environment becomes increasingly vivid, you’re more and more likely to become a product of it. Taken to an extreme, you become nothing but a creation of your readership, subject to its changing desires and fads. The challenge is to create content that simultaneously advances your goals and the satisfies the wants of your audience.
Someone smarter than I am should build an analytics engine that could examine the web of backlinks and personal relationships and use it to analyze the blogosphere, stripping out everything attributable to a standard motivation (giving the audience what they want, quid pro quo linking, promoting friends’ or personal ventures, establishing oneself as an expert in the area of ones’ employment, and so on.) Would the remnant be one’s core identity, and would it give more insight than the rest?
