Blogging pecking order
This entry is an unusually long pontification on the way different blogging services are perceived by pop media/culture. I've hidden it behind an LJ cut to avoid bothering people who don't care who have long friendslists.
I've been reading articles from sources like Wired Magazine for the past couple months that imply a certain pecking order when it comes to people who keep blogs on different types of services. The choices for criteria of this heirarchy are surprisingly universal, and are somewhat telling when it comes to determining the ulterior motives of those determining the ranking. These standards, happily enough, cut across political and class lines, as long as one stays within the official journalistic or the educated sets.
The very bottom of the barrel, very consistently, is Myspace. As it focuses on memes, trivia, and bits of personal information, instead of providing space for a person to air their personal views at any length, the quality of writing is not high, and the quality of information (depth of information) provided is, well, abysmal. Add to that the fact that many Myspace templates are very obnoxious and ignore the importance of whitespace (which was a major issue in my high school journalism class) and those who are interested in putting up educational and in-depth material run for the hills. But it seems that this is not Myspace's goal: it doesn't seek to be a place of political unrest or emotional exploration.
Next on the list come Xanga and Facebook. They rank a little higher than Myspace because Xanga provides real blogging space, and Facebook is slightly less obnoxious than Myspace on the whole (which may or may not have something to do with the limited audience made up entirely of students and alums: anybody with a Facebook account has at least attended a semester of college in the last decade).
Next on the list comes LiveJournal. These guys rank a little lower than the other standard blogging services for two reasons: LJ's incredible popularity with ditzy teenage girls, and the fact that you have to pay to get extra userpics and imagehosting. and such.
GreatestJournal, due to the fact that it's entirely free, is usually ranked a bit higher than LJ because it lets you have myriads of userpics right off the bat. However, because GJ allows ads on profile pages and such, there are a few purists who take issue.
Blogger seems to be near the top, and I'm given to understand that it offers an incredible amount of personalization. It also seems to have a higher average level of wriitng, for no reason I can discover. However I'm not terribly familiar with this service.
The blogs with the highest level of "screen-cred" as it were, are without a doubt the personal domain blogs, on someone's domain that they bought. Presumably this has something to do with the fact that not only did they pay to set it up, but also that there was more work involved in setting it up than just going with a prefab blog.
So what does this imply about the pecking order? Well, there seems to be a certain amount of elitism within the press corps about blogs when it comes to readibility and basic GUMPS (grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.) which is great to see in an internet where chatrooms and MySpace seem to have eliminated correct/outdated/Queen's/cranky old grammar teacher's English, whatever you want to call it.
Personally, I like correct spelling, I like careful sentence structure, and heaven knows I had the basics of grammar pounded into my head for almost a decade in elementary school. I don't claim to be perfect, but when I'm expressing myself in any kind of forum I do make it a point to at least be readable and correct obvious typos. I was brought up to see this as basic courtesy to others.
So is it a possibility, or even a fact that the internet and/or blogs have changed the literacy rate? The communications rate? Is there an ethical difference between using the internet to have a penpal in another ocuntry and using it to watch funny videos of crap stupid people do? How might blogging change in the next few years?
I think that the next five years are crucial to the world of blogs. I imagine that one of two things will happen: either the larger blogging services will begin to conglomerate, ending in only two or three possibilities (and if this happens I hope it ends up with like linking with like, instead of having LJ turn into Myspace); or, the blogging services will proliferate like bunnies, and the internet will be wilder and even more confused than it is now.
I'm not really sure which one I'm hoping for, but I'm looking forward to seeing what happens anyways.
I've been reading articles from sources like Wired Magazine for the past couple months that imply a certain pecking order when it comes to people who keep blogs on different types of services. The choices for criteria of this heirarchy are surprisingly universal, and are somewhat telling when it comes to determining the ulterior motives of those determining the ranking. These standards, happily enough, cut across political and class lines, as long as one stays within the official journalistic or the educated sets.
The very bottom of the barrel, very consistently, is Myspace. As it focuses on memes, trivia, and bits of personal information, instead of providing space for a person to air their personal views at any length, the quality of writing is not high, and the quality of information (depth of information) provided is, well, abysmal. Add to that the fact that many Myspace templates are very obnoxious and ignore the importance of whitespace (which was a major issue in my high school journalism class) and those who are interested in putting up educational and in-depth material run for the hills. But it seems that this is not Myspace's goal: it doesn't seek to be a place of political unrest or emotional exploration.
Next on the list come Xanga and Facebook. They rank a little higher than Myspace because Xanga provides real blogging space, and Facebook is slightly less obnoxious than Myspace on the whole (which may or may not have something to do with the limited audience made up entirely of students and alums: anybody with a Facebook account has at least attended a semester of college in the last decade).
Next on the list comes LiveJournal. These guys rank a little lower than the other standard blogging services for two reasons: LJ's incredible popularity with ditzy teenage girls, and the fact that you have to pay to get extra userpics and imagehosting. and such.
GreatestJournal, due to the fact that it's entirely free, is usually ranked a bit higher than LJ because it lets you have myriads of userpics right off the bat. However, because GJ allows ads on profile pages and such, there are a few purists who take issue.
Blogger seems to be near the top, and I'm given to understand that it offers an incredible amount of personalization. It also seems to have a higher average level of wriitng, for no reason I can discover. However I'm not terribly familiar with this service.
The blogs with the highest level of "screen-cred" as it were, are without a doubt the personal domain blogs, on someone's domain that they bought. Presumably this has something to do with the fact that not only did they pay to set it up, but also that there was more work involved in setting it up than just going with a prefab blog.
So what does this imply about the pecking order? Well, there seems to be a certain amount of elitism within the press corps about blogs when it comes to readibility and basic GUMPS (grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.) which is great to see in an internet where chatrooms and MySpace seem to have eliminated correct/outdated/Queen's/cranky old grammar teacher's English, whatever you want to call it.
Personally, I like correct spelling, I like careful sentence structure, and heaven knows I had the basics of grammar pounded into my head for almost a decade in elementary school. I don't claim to be perfect, but when I'm expressing myself in any kind of forum I do make it a point to at least be readable and correct obvious typos. I was brought up to see this as basic courtesy to others.
So is it a possibility, or even a fact that the internet and/or blogs have changed the literacy rate? The communications rate? Is there an ethical difference between using the internet to have a penpal in another ocuntry and using it to watch funny videos of crap stupid people do? How might blogging change in the next few years?
I think that the next five years are crucial to the world of blogs. I imagine that one of two things will happen: either the larger blogging services will begin to conglomerate, ending in only two or three possibilities (and if this happens I hope it ends up with like linking with like, instead of having LJ turn into Myspace); or, the blogging services will proliferate like bunnies, and the internet will be wilder and even more confused than it is now.
I'm not really sure which one I'm hoping for, but I'm looking forward to seeing what happens anyways.