16 of 30 - Blogological Recap

[aggienaut]

   A year ago today I discovered the blogosphere. I was messing with this thing that shows you how you are connected to any livejournal user through friends and friends-of (I lost the link to it when my comptuer decided to randomly erase all my bookmarks), and between myself and kris there was a incomple who appeared to be on a mission to make 30 interesting posts in thirty days. Intrigued I investigated and found others doing the same. I had discovered 30 in 30 halfway through.
   Not only were they on a bizarre blog related quest, but they had even developed somewhat of a philosophical framework about this thing we call the Blogosphere. Fascinated, I delved deeper into this blogology.
   Basically the blogosphere is divided into two main camps. There are underbloggers, and there are megabloggers. Underbloggers use livejournal as a sort of diary.. they don't really care if anyone is reading, they just wanted a place to ramble. There's nothing wrong with that really, if you're into that kind of think. Megabloggers on the other hand write to be read. As such megabloggers strive to be interesting and amusing. 30 in 30 is about megabloggery.
   Many megabloggers measure their success by the size of their friends-of list, or even by the ratio of their friends list to their friends-of list. This unfortunately seems more likely to result in bloglitest than anything else, with the likes of say incomple with his .418 to 1 ratio not friending me after over a year of running with the same blog crowd, because adding friends reduces ratio. I did a thorough study of blogological statistics last year and determined that the best indicator of megablog success is average comments per entry. Also very interesting to note is friends-ofs per month the livejournal has existed, ie how many people friend you per month. One more statistic that has some meaning, comments received / comments made: if you have a higher ratio, don't get excited, you're just not bothering to respond -- but if you have a low ratio, people are leaving you hanging all the time, you need to improve your comment quality! 1.23 was the average of the study group, of which most were within .4. If you're below .6, you may be a loser.

   Needless to say, one is by definition not a megablogger if they post friends-only and similarly in contempt of the spirit of 30 in 30 if they disable comments.

   Also, evilblogger nibot has led an outcry of persons outside megabloggist community against so-called "meta-entries" -- entries about entries, or about making entries, or whathaveyou. First of all, I'd like to begin with an ad hominem attack, that is, that this theory has been proposed by someone who is clearly evil. Secondly I'd like to point out that some awesome entries have been made that are in fact metabloggistic. Thirdly, I'd like to point out that there's no compelling reason to disallow such entries. If you do it to the point that people are tired of hearing you talk about talking, then you've violated megablog anti-boring ordinances, but if you can make it amusing, its all good in my opinion. Opponents say its cheating of some kind I think, but I'd like to hear in exactly what way it shortchanges the readers before we start throwing that about. In conclusion, nibot is just a trouble-making naysayer.


Poll of the Day - this link to last poll should have been included in this question.
[Poll #514558]


Picture of the Day

Kristy has brilliant kitten photographing skillz

Previously on Emosnail
   Two Years Ago Today: Still Here - Its way too hot here
   Year Ago Today: Megaunderbloggery - The madness begins!

Comments

[codetoad.livejournal.com]

I object to this post on the grounds that nibot objected to some of yours last year: This is a meta-post!

metameta

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

I was actually thinking about addressing that. Which is a meta meta undertaking.

metarecap

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

a better objection would be that I said nearly everything I said here once before, though that was a year ago. Its rather a recap (as noted in the title) which is more shady then metabloggery.

also note I noted the metabloggery debate in the body of the entry, complete with a logical fallacy. (=

[apoplecticfittz.livejournal.com]

Oh what a year it has been...

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

A. My comment about not commenting about the previous poll: I was supposed to pretend that I hadn't read it, according to the stated restrictions on readership.

B. This post is noteworthy for some of the amusing vocabulary you initiate:
blogological
blogistic
anti-boring ordinances
honorable mentions:
"if you're into that kind of think." a mistake, but clearly an appropriate one.

I know what a blog is...

[(Anonymous)]

Dude, I have a

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<a href"http://punningpundit.com/">') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

Dude, I have a <a href"http://punningpundit.com/">Blog</a>. You’ve got a Live Journal. I know they look the same to you. But they’re not. LJ’s are strange, blog-like things which exist in order to create communities. Blogs are a whole ‘nother beast... /elitism

Andrew Cory

The importance of metabloggery

[(Anonymous)]

Metabloggery is an important part of the blogosphere -- it translates more interesting posts into higher Google pageranks. The more interesting megablog posts will attract more metabloggers linking to them. This will increase the pagerank of interesting blog posts.

The importance of metabloggery could possibly be reduced if there was a search engine that searches blogs and ranks results by some commenting hueristic.

Google can also find blog entries based when the match for the search was in a comment, and this proposed search engine probably would not (unless we invented another form of hueristic for sorting comments based on the number of replies).

Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/), which is essentially a form of metabloggery has far more comments on its posts than anywhere else ever could, so it would kind of rank at the top every search. In this case, to study the effectiveness of such a search system, we would need to study how metabloggers' comment ratios compare with megabloggers' comment ratios.

--Ken Bloom

Re: The importance of metabloggery

[(Anonymous)]

I should comment that I interpret metabloggery to mean very thin discussion of someone else's post, when the essence of the metablogger's post is basically to say "check out what this guy wrote over here on this blog".

Re: The importance of metabloggery

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

Ah, I was using metabloggery to mean blogging about blogging basically. For example this post is about blogging, and this one I linked to above is about coming up with an entry. Its been noted that every so often college paper columnists, particularly the humor columnists, will resort to some kind of attempt at humor regarding how they come up with columns, and this tends not to be terribly funny because its been done repeatedly and illustrates a lack of imagination. nibot has drawn a kind of false corollation fallacy between Daily Cal Columnists write meta-entries > these entries are lame and shouldn't be done > Emosnail does meta-entries > these entries are therefore lame and shouldn't be done -- but the reason the meta entries are lame in the first instance isn't because tehy're meta entries but because they're lame and unimaginative...

Re: The importance of metabloggery

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

Too bad I disabled this journal from being cataloged by google. It was contributing way too much to completely random people I mention doing a name search, finding it, and becoming alarmed.

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

Indeed Kris. By weird freak of chance, or something, your livejournal led me to incomple which led me to apoplecticfittz, emd, and well the rest of the "megablogger" crew, totally at least nine of the people currently on my friends list!

[ooorabiesooo.livejournal.com]

that cat seriously looks fake/possessed

[twinkiebat.livejournal.com]

freaking aww!