Time to retire the term “blogger”?

Has the word “blogger” become meaningless?

Consider this item (from Mediabistro’s Fishbowl LA):

We asked [Jay] Rosen what he thought of the term “blogger” and how there is not a word to distinguish a journalist who blogs and a numbnut who blogs.

“Blogger will become such a broad term it will lose all meaning,” he told FBLA.

Rosen later elaborated on Twitter:

We don’t say “Emailer James Fallows,” even though he uses email. Eventually, it will be the same with the term “blogger.”

Let’s unpack this.

“Blogger” confuses us today because we’ve conflated two different meanings of “blogging.” There is the formal definition: personal website, reverse chronological order, lots of links. Then there is what I would call the ideological definition: a bundle of associations many observers made with blogs in their formative years, having to do with DIY authenticity, amateur self-expression, defiant “disintermediation” (cutting out the media middleman), and so on.

Today professional journalism has embraced the blog form, since it is a versatile and effective Web-native format for posting news. But once you have dozens of bloggers at the New York Times, or entire media companies built around blogs, the ideological trappings of blogging are only going to cause confusion.

Still — wary as I am of taking issue with Rosen, whose prescience is formidable — I don’t think we will see the term “blogger” fade away any time soon. There’s a difference between a term that’s so broad it’s lost all meaning and a term that has a couple of useful meanings that may conflict with each other.

After all, we still use the word “journalist,” even though it has cracked in two (“journalist” as professional label vs. “journalist” as descriptor of an activity). This is where human language (what programmers call “natural language”) differs from computer languages: our usage of individual words changes as it records our experience with their evolving meanings.

In other words, the multiple meanings of the word “blogger” may bedevil us, but they also tell a story.


 

Some Say Everything links

Say Everything is getting around. Here’s some links to recent coverage and related stuff:

My two favorite speaking gigs about the book are now both online. Fora.tv was there at the Hillside Club in Berkeley a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the video, in which you can, among other things, hear my “Top Ten Myths About Blogging”:

Also online now is a slightly different version of the same talk, which I gave at Microsoft Research earlier in July. Microsoft does a neat trick with timing the video and the presentation slides — but, warning, it will only work in IE.

Todd Bishop of Seattle’s TechFlash did a nice in-depth Q&A with me:

Q: What have blogs meant in the evolution of the Internet?

Rosenberg: I identify blogging as the first mass experience of having a read-write web or a two-way web or a user-generated web – all these terms mean the same thing. They mean a web that we create ourselves. 1994, 1995 was when people first saw browsers and got excited, and it took a good five, seven, eight years from that point for blogs to show people, this is what that vision is about – this is what it looks like when anyone can contribute..

Other Q&As are at Time.com, by Dan Fletcher. (But, hey, Time, what’s with the little red links every couple of paragraphs? Pretty crude.) And over at the NewsHour’s Art Beat blog, by Chris Amico. Also in Reason, by Jesse Walker:

Reason: Of the ’90s pioneers you write about in the first section of the book, are there any that you feel haven’t really gotten their due?

Rosenberg: In a way, that whole era is unjustly forgotten. The tech industry and indeed the online world have very little memory of history. One of my purposes in writing the book was to get it down while it’s still fresh in my mind, everyone’s still around to interview, and the pages can still be hauled out of the Internet Archive.

The Web moves really quickly, and we’ve had several generations of excitement. Today we have Twitter and Facebook and all of that, and people are having experiences in which they feel that they’re doing things for the first time. But nearly all of these experiences are things that people went through in the ’90s or the early part of the 2000s, whether it was revealing too much of your life and getting in trouble, or dreaming of some sort of utopia where we can all express ourselves and never get into fights. Telling those stories just seemed important.

On the review front, we’ve been in Business Week (“Gracefully written and well researched, Say Everything captures the drama of blogging’s rapid-fire rise”), the Seattle Times, the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall St. Journal.

Then there is Andrew Keen’s review, in the Barnes and Noble Review:

Rosenberg criticizes mogul Barry Diller for suggesting that talent remains the one scarcity in today’s media. But this book is a glitteringly subversive argument against Rosenberg’s own thesis. It’s a beautifully written and meticulously fair narrative about the past, present, and future of the blog. Only somebody with Rosenberg’s incomparable ability could have written Say Everything. We are lucky to have his unique talent.

My point about Diller, of course, was never meant to suggest that talent is or has become widespread or universal. Rather, I took issue with the media exec’s smug attitude that the old world he inhabits already does a thorough job of locating and rewarding talent. But, er, I’d be foolish to argue too strenuously here!

I’m also grateful to all the bloggers who’ve posted about the book so far, including, but certainly not limited to, J.D. Lasica, Peter Merholz, Rafe Colburn, Paul Kedrosky (“funny, authoritative, full of great-great stories and anecdotes, and admirably even-handed”), Rogers Cadenhead, Ed Cone, Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, John McDaid, and Scott Carpenter (“An amazing job… It is a real joy to find a book like this one, where I can fall under its spell as I increasingly trust the author to tell a good tale”).


 

Saying everything on KQED Forum

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of talking about Say Everything with Michael Krasny on KQED’s Forum. I don’t think I fully infected Michael with my enthusiasm for bloggers and their place in our culture, but I was grateful for the rare opportunity this show (and host) provides to dig really deeply into a subject over the course of an hour.

One of my arguments is that blogs — so long derided as trivial — are actually the format we employ today when we want to go deep into any subject or topic. Forum and blogs: separated at birth?

Here’s the audio from the show:


 

Appearances, actual and virtual

Tomorrow night (Wednesday, July 29) at 7:30 pm, I’m speaking about Say Everything at the Hillside Club here in Berkeley. The event is sponsored by Berkeley Arts and Letters and also by the Berkeley Cybersalon, a series that I have been attending, in various forms, for 15 years now.

Also, it looks like I’m going to be on KQED Forum this Thursday morning at 10 AM — listen in, call in, ask me interesting questions!

Finally, this week I’m guest-blogging over at the Powell’s Books site. My first post was all about why I wrote Say Everything as a book and not a blog. (I assumed this would be sort of obvious — but as my Powell’s piece was being posted, the Wall Street Journal published a review arguing that my book “would have worked better as a blog.” So go figure.)

In my second Powell’s post, I look at what “master narratives” we can find in the story of the rise of blogging.


 

Another archival find: Gillmor’s original blog

Blog historian Rudolf Ammann has done it again. First he pointed out that my statement in Say Everything that Cameron Barrett’s original blogroll had not been archived was inaccurate. Now he has dug up links to most of the original content in Dan Gillmor’s pioneering EJournal blog for the San Jose Mercury News, beginning in 1999. (Here’s a link to Gillmor’s very first post, in October 1999.) Based on Gillmor’s comments to me in an interview for the book, along with my own failed efforts to find them, I’d concluded that these pages were not available on the Web in any form.

I’m delighted that another little slice of Web history turns out to be available; grateful, once more to the amazing Internet Archive, for saving so much of our collective past and making it available via the “Wayback Machine”; and making a mental note to myself to try many more alternate domains when hitting a wall in archive searches.

I am no slouch in the ways of the Wayback Machine, but I tip my hat to Ammann, who is plainly a more adept archival sleuth than I am!


 

A.P. goes nuclear on fair use

“A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web.” That’s the headline on a New York Times article right now. But if you read the article, you see that the Associated Press’s new campaign isn’t only about “unpaid use of articles,” it’s about any use of headlines as links. In other words, it sounds like A.P. is pulling the pin on a legal Doomsday Machine for news and information on the Web — claiming that there is no fair use right to link to articles using a brief snippet of verbiage from that article, or the original headline on the article.

In other words, if that Times story were by the A.P., I would be breaking the A.P.’s new rules just by using the ten words at the beginning of this post. My new book, which is filled with hundreds of quotes and URLs that (on the book’s website) link to the sources, would be a massive violation of the rules.

The A.P. seems to want to try to squeeze money both from Google and from sites that aggregate headlines. The Times story says: “The goal, [A.P. president Tom Curley] said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.” (Under A.P. rules, could I quote that?)

This move is foolish and self-defeating. If it has to, Google can simply block A.P. stories, and I’m sure it will choose to do that rather than agree to pay A.P.’s new fees. More simply, Google’s lawyers can point to the fact that any publisher can already opt out of Google’s system any time he/she wants to.

The A.P. isn’t going to build the hundreds-of-millions-of-dollar business it speaks about based on this effort; the most it can hope for is to sequester its version of the news off in a corner from the rest of the Web, where fewer and fewer will read it.

The danger is that this conflict will make it into the courts and some judge will narrow the fair use principle in ways that hurt both the Web and the free flow of information in our society.

As I wrote last year:

In the meantime, the biggest priority here for those of us who care about the long-term health of the web is that we don’t wind up with a terrible legal precedent that defines fair use in some newly constricted way. The people who are calling the AP out on this aren’t crazed piratical scofflaws; they’re journalists and authors, just as I am, people who pay the rent based on the value of the content they produce. But you need some assurance that you can quote brief excerpts or you can’t write non-fiction at all.

For a primer on this issue, you can see these posts (first, a second, a third, and a wrap) from last year, when A.P. got into a scrap with well-known blogger Rogers Cadenhead by sending him a legal takedown notice.

UPDATE: Zach Seward at Nieman Lab has a post covering some of the legal aspects of this story.


 

Live from Seattle

Just a note to let you all know that I’m in Seattle for Say Everything-related events.

If you’re around these parts, come on down to the University Bookstore at 7 p.m. Wednesday for my talk and booksigning. Would love to see you there.

Seattle is in sunny glory tonight. What a place when the gloom clears!