Mike Arrington responds to Nick Carr’s The Great Unread post by asking “Is Nick Carr the new Robin Hood, or Just an Asshole?”

That sounds to me like an annoyed king trying to scatter the peasants that have gathered outside the castle walls. Perhaps the great conversation that is occurring in the comments to Nick’s post sounds to Mike like the rumblings of an angry fiefdom who should simply throw down their torches and return to the fields.

If the king opened the gate to the castle, I imagine a conversation something like this:

King Mike: I am your king.
Peasant Nick: Well I didn’t vote for you.
King Mike: You don’t vote for kings.
Peasant Nick: Well how’d you become king then?
[Angelic music plays… ]
King Mike: Cory, Steve and Hugh, their blogs plastered upon Techmeme held aloft their linkcounts from the bosom of Technorati, signifying by temporal providence that I, Mike, was to join them. THAT is why I am your king.
Peasant Seth: [interrupting] Listen, geeks sittin’ at computers distributin’ links is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical journalistic ceremony.

Mike says that Nick “has no idea what blogging is all about” and that “at the end of the day those people with interesting things to say tend to get listened to. Those that don’t…don’t.” You’ve got to be kidding me. Yes, you can muscle your way into the club- no one is denying that. But if Mike thinks that a blogger’s audience is determined more by how he writes than by how many of the castle dwellers throw him bones, then it is he, not Nick, that is confused about how blogging works.

There are a lot of people who can think and write a lot better the Mike, Nick and me, who will never be read because they are stuck at the bottom of blogger’s hill looking for the trail. Too many people on the hill start believing their own bullshit and forget that.

Then Mike goes on to say that, as long as you’re allowed to talk, it doesn’t matter whether you’re at the table enjoying the feast or taking a 5 minute break from working the fields:

“It’s not so much about how one blog can rise through the ranks and get popular. What I love about blogging is the fact that an ecosystem exists, where conversations spring up about anything at all, involving all who wish to participate (through blogs, comments and trackbacks), evolve and move on to other things.”

That is a text book example of talking one’s position. It’s easy to say money doesn’t matter when you just won the lottery, just like it’s easy to be on a diet when you just ate. I don’t think Mike would be so philosophic about all of this if he were stuck out in the fields and not at the head of the table.

Mike chastises Nick for being bitter. I sense much more bitterness in Mike’s post than in Nick’s. I guess the king is allowed to be bitter.

The rest of us are too busy plowing to be anything but tired.

Tags: blogs, blogging, blog+building

Nick Carr has posted about the innocent fraud that is the notion of an egalitarian blogosphere.

He makes a lot of really good points, including the sadly indisputable fact that the cult of blogging that we all embrace to one extent or the other is not the democratic, all for one and one for all place that we sometimes pretend it is.

I have been very active in the movement to knock down the gates and level the earth in that regard. Now that I actually have some readers, I go out of my way to engage new or undiscovered bloggers. But the fact that I have clawed my way up part of blogger’s hill does not change the fact that it is a hill. Or that I am not yet at the top. Or, more importantly, that there are a ton of people who can think and write better than any of us who are still at the bottom looking for the trail.

Nick’s post is a very thoughtful summary of the state of the blogosphere as it appears to those not at the very top of blogger’s hill. Reading his discussion of the lengths new bloggers have to go to to get recognized by established bloggers is enough to make even the most stalwart climber pause and consider whether the effort is truly worth it.

The idea, espoused by a popular blogger at a recent conference, is that to get links from the so-called blogging elite, you must link to them and add substantive thought to their topic. Without a doubt, that is an honest answer, and probably the most effective way to get some top of the hill links. It is also horribly inefficient, since in a semi-perfect world we would be writing not to get a charitable link, but to further the distributed conversations that some of us believe is the purpose and beauty of blogging. If I speak to you only to promote what you might say to me in response, are we truly talking, or am I merely a beggar asking for alms for the poor?

Does the enlightened A-Lister really believe it is the duty of his position to pass out links to the less fortunate? Hungry peasants can storm the castle. What can lonely bloggers do?

While I may be over-simplifying things a little, I think the so-called blogging elite are no different than any other slice of the population. Some of them are regular folks, confident in themselves and their real word positions. These folks are generally equal-opportunity linkers, probably because they get little of their identity from blogging. Others view their place at the top of blogger’s hill as a birthright, notwithstanding the fact that their place in the succession is often derived largely from the fact they were early adopters of what is still a fringe activity. Most are somewhere in between the two extremes.

But it is a hard climb, just to get where they can hear you if you call out. There’s no denying that.

Like Nick’s peasant listening to the party from outside the castle walls, I have a mental list of other bloggers who seem to go out of their way to link around me. Sometimes I get a little insecure and wish I could force them into a real world discussion of whatever issue is at hand, just so I could show them that having a popular blog doesn’t make them as smart as they think. But mostly I just chuckle and move on to conversations with those who are willing.

All of this reminds me of a recent post by OmegaMom, one of my favorite newish bloggers. She recounted reading a Pew report that found that most people blog for “creative, personal expression.”

Maybe it’s the act of expression that matters, and not so much the reaction to such expression.

Trees continue to fall in the vacant woods. The only question is whether they make any sound.