Jane! Get me off this crazy thing!
– George Jetson

Louis Gray has a very good read on the Technorati authority system, which for the two of you who don’t already know, tabulates the number of links from unique blogs (i.e., only one link from each blog counts) over a 180 day period and uses that number as an approximation of your authority within the blogosphere.  This system, while flawed, is presumably an attempt to address what Ken Jennings was talking about yesterday when analyzing the semi-final of the Grand Slam game show he seems to be in the process of winning:

Clearly, it’s hard to come back from any deficit whatsoever in Grand Slam. Players are just checking out of the games too early. Not intentionally, but the mysterious human brain must just be better at algebra and anagrams when it knows it has the confidence of a little time cushion. (I’m reminded of those studies showing that girls do just as well as boys on math problems when they get an empowering lecture first, or that minority students do worse on standardized tests when they even have to write their name or identify their race at the top of the page. Confidence gets those cerebral juices flowing.) This is a problem as a contestant; it’s an even bigger problem if you’re a network exec. What good is your split-second lightning format if one player always ends up winning by a full minute or two?

The game is simple and elegant as it is, but I wonder if it doesn’t need to be tweaked somehow so that early-round wins have less effect on the overall final-round clock.

The idea behind the Technorati system is to keep the blog rankings fresh, so that those of us not at the top of blogger’s hill will feel like we still have a chance.  It’s Technorati’s way of giving us that confidence booster.  The thing is, though, it doesn’t work.

Unless Technorati takes Louis’s advice to heart and resets the link counts every day, which certainly would result in a few more Appalachian State-like upsets, those bloggers with the mindshare and the momentum will always get more links than those of us without it, whether the measurement period is a few days or a month of Sundays.  Lots of folks would have us believe that every 180 days is a new game with the promise of a road victory over the incumbent A-Listers in front of their 109,000 fans.  But just like Ken Jennings is very, very likely to beat all comers in games of knowledge and intelligence, those who currently have the links, and the reputation that, rightly or wrongly, follows all that attention, are going to get more links and claim more “authority” under the Technorati system.  Some will point to the occasional statistical anomaly, but mathematically, it’s true.

Leaving aside the age old question about popularity as a stand-in for authority, what’s to be done about it?

That’s a really hard question, because, generally speaking, those who claim links don’t matter are the ones who either have more than they can handle (to paraphrase Raising Arizona) or who claim to embrace self-imposed isolation as a protest against the whole links as societal affirmation thing.  Other than a general feeling that links do matter, I don’t have a wholly satisfactory answer.

My Swivel Feeds experiment has certainly taught me that there are a lot of really talented and interesting people out there blogging away in relative obscurity while other less talented writers, many of whom post regurgitated versions of the same thing in some cross linking, sleep-inducing dance of the who cares, continue to rack up links and reader counts.  I’ve certainly tried to bring attention to some relatively undiscovered gems, but it’s an inefficient process at best.  The obscure leading the obscure further into obscurity.  Or something like that.

I suppose the best approach is, as always, to take the middle ground.  Links do matter and should be encouraged, but conversations and the friendships that develop around them are also important.  There are 10-15 bloggers, maybe more, who I have over time come to view as friends (not the Facebook kind, but the real kind).  I can tell when a new person has joined that group because I always check their feeds daily, even when I don’t have time to read all my feeds.  If I get secretly irritated at you when you haven’t posted in a day or two, that means you have transcended the blogosphere and become important to me on a personal level.  That is the sort of authority that matters.  Not so much the number of links from unique blogs.  It’s not a perfect answer, but given the variables involved, I think it’s the best one we have.

The blogosphere is imperfect and uneven.  Like life.  There’s only so much we can do to change either one.  But like life, the way to improve the quality of the experience is first and foremost to avoid buying into a system designed for the betterment of a few to the detriment of many.  Drop out of the rat race.  Step off of the Technorati treadmill.

And, in their place, align yourself with good and interesting people.  Not as a clique, but as a community.  An open gathering of those with shared passions and goals.

Good friends made for good reasons makes the trip easier, safer, more fun.

And sometimes together you can actually make a difference.

The more I think about it, the more I believe the whole video blogging movement is a step back and to the nerdy.

You can’t easily pause in the middle of video blog posts, move along and return later to finish reading them.  You can’t search for content within them.  They don’t archive well.

You have to watch a ton of boring stuff you don’t care about just to find the part that interests you.  It’s like searching through reams of microfilm to find that one relevant newspaper article you think you remember reading years ago.

There is a low barrier for entry, so you get a whole lot of chaff with the wheat.  Many video blog posts are like home movies eagerly sprung on unsuspecting visitors- they bring geometrically more joy to the people in them than to the people watching them.

They take more time when the idea should be to convey information in less time.  It’s not just that people can read faster than other people can talk, though that’s part of it.  It’s the fact that there are a lot of other sources for interesting and efficient multimedia content.  And thanks to PVRs, most TV shows come with a fast forward button.

They dilute the momentum of the blogging movement, which is already waning thanks to conscription by profiteers and social networks.

And they make bloggers appear even more nerdy to the rest of the world.  That’s a tall order, but there you go.

Would I wipe all homemade video content from blogs?  Absolutely not.  Videos as a primary medium have their place, and that place is YouTube.  Where they can then be served up as accretive blog content.

Even the occasional video post used to spice up a traditional blog can provide value and entertainment.  Several of my pals do that.

Occasional video content is one thing.  Home movies as a substitute for journalism is something else altogether.

My hunch is that video blogging will experience the same life cycle as many prior hype du jours.  Few to many to few.  Novelty to hype to irrelevance.

I hope so.

Chip Camden and TDavid have written interesting posts in response to Jeff Atwood’s 13 Blog Cliches.  I tend to do a lot of the stuff on Jeff’s list too.

Here’s my brief take on the 13…

Before I resigned myself to life without parole in Blogger prison, I used to want a calendar widget bad.  Looking back, I think that was because I saw it as a trapping of WordPress freedom.  I’m over that now.  I don’t want a calendar widget or any of the thousand or so other things I could do if I could get my freakin’ blog moved to WordPress without losing all my permalinks.  No flair for me.  Nosiree.

Random images….  Just like Doors’ lyrics and snowflakes and Dave Winer’s recurring blogospats, how do we know they’re really random?  Maybe we just can’t decipher the pattern or metaphor or whatever.  I bet lots of them are less random than they appear at first glance.  Sort of like Thomas Hawk’s photo names.

Big blog rolls on your blog are B-A-D, but only if Newsome.Org isn’t in it.  I really like big honking blog rolls when my blog is in the list.  I keep my big, fat blog roll on my portal page.  If I ever get through my Swivel Feeds experiment, my blog roll is going on a crash diet.  The cats are wearing on me.

I use a Technorati tag cloud thing here, but I have a feeling it won’t be here long term.  I suppose when Google buys the remains of Technorati one day, it will become a Google tag cloud.  Shortly afterwards, I’ll get all paranoid that it’s spying on me and take it down.

Ads.  Those mystical things that make the internet go ’round.  I had an AdSense account for about a month.  I made somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter.  No more ads for me.  Mike thinks I could make more if I did it thoughtfully.  Maybe, but then I’d have to stop complaining about ads, and where’s the fun in that?  To put it mildly, I am not a believer in advertising’s long term ability to support the internet hysteria.

Number 8 is just wrong.  I’d rather read about someone’s day than yet another post raving about the latest social network or Facebook application.  Nobody’s life is as boring as that.  Like TDavid, I tend to choose interesting voices over interesting subject matter.  The two best posts of the year so far are this one by Will Truman (I’m down to thinking about it weekly now; it was daily for a good while) and Paul Lester‘s Freebird post.  Those posts are all about the writer.

Sorry I haven’t been posting much (see number 9).  TDavid is right that I lose momentum when I go on hiatus, but I can’t help it.  Sometimes I get caught up in the very bearable lightness of not blogging.

Blogging about blogging is actually a contrarian approach during these social network-crazed days.