Where was I?

It turns out that starting a small company, getting a project in gear, and hiring people is time-consuming.

I knew that. But I didn’t fully calculate how fully all of it would distract me from the routine of blogging. Then there was some travel and some family commitments, and — my god, it’s a month later.

I should probably have been posting about it all as I went along, but once I stopped posting, it became easy just to…continue not posting.

That will end. Now!

“Everyone’s a critic” used to be a joke; now it’s a fact. You may take populist pride in the Web’s profusion of user-contributed reviews; you may wish Yelp had never been invented. Either way, if you create stuff or sell things, you’re going to get written about.

Authors have probably been dealing with this new world longer than any other creative group, thanks to the early introduction to user reviews that Amazon.com gave the publishing industry, beginning in 1995. There has never been a shortage of disdain for the phenomenon from professionals — most recently with Joe Queenan’s satire in the Wall Street Journal last week, imagining classics getting savaged by the unwashed Amazon masses: “Their courageous sniping from behind the bushes, emulating Ethan Allen and the Swamp Fox back in 1776, reaffirms that democracy functions best when you fire your musket and then run away.”

At this late stage in the decline of the media business, however, authors can’t be too picky. The opportunity to be reviewed by professionals — however bittersweet it may be to begin with — is increasingly rare. Newspapers and magazines review only a tiny fraction of the books published each month. These days, we are all going to be reviewed by one another, for better or worse. So which is it?

I had a great experience with the Amazon reviews for Dreaming in Code, and so far, the same is holding for Say Everything, though the volume to date is lighter (my hunch is that people interested in blogs are more likely to have their own blogs and to post their thoughts there). Right now there are four reviews of the book: two highly positive, two quite negative. Plainly I’m happier about the former than the latter. The resulting average star rating isn’t as stellar as I’d like.

But if you read the reviews, you see that the positive reviews are carefully written posts from people who seem to care about the topic. The negatives, on the other hand, well — you can see for yourself: one is hard to make much sense of, and the other is by someone who declares that “most bloggers write solipsisms and only for themselves. Worse yet, most are also obnoxious and ignorant.”

My belief in the value of “everyone’s a critic” stems from my confidence in everyone’s ability to scan a batch of posts and sort out what’s of use. People often complain, “Gee, doesn’t that take work?” Well, no, not that much — if you can skim posts you can take the pulse of the pro and con contributions pretty easily. The other big complaint is that reader reviews are too subjective, and you end up with a lot of contradictory chatter. That’s not precisely wrong, but it really describes any set of reviews. (The San Francisco Chronicle reviewer for Say Everything, Tom Goldstein, thought my book was “snappy,” while the Seattle Times critic said it was a “slog”.)

I should add that Amazon, though still dominant, isn’t the only significant platform for user book reviews. There are Facebook apps for sharing “What I’m reading” notes, and there’s GoodReads, a social network for sharing what you’re reading and what you thought about it.

You never know what you’ll find, either. I headed over to GoodReads and found Wired’s Steven Levy, weighing in on GoodReads’ page for Say Everything: “Really well-reasearched and artfully presented… Scott is very sensitive and perceptive, and doesn’t merely hash over tired controversies, but brings sharp insight to the blogging saga.”

Craig Newmark recently wondered whether user review sites would be “the next big media/advertising disruption”; I think that disruption is already underway. Compared to the old model of hiring, paying and editing professional critics, these sites are cheaper to operate and able to be far more comprehensive in covering things like local restaurants or, for that matter, books.

Can they substitute for the work of the best professional critics? Of course not. But they provide plenty of value, and I don’t think authors or anyone else should be afraid of them. We can cherish what good we find (not just the positive reviews but the negative ones that actually engage with the work) and screen out the pointless chatter and the drive-by snarking — confident that others will be just as adept at that as we are.

During the runup to Obama’s announcement of his pick for the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Rosen wrote a piece for the New Republic’s website, passing on anonymous slurs against Sonia Sotomayor, amounting to a characterization of her as a cartoonish loose cannon: “not that smart and kind of a bully,” in the words of one of Rosen’s anonymous sources. In retrospect the piece looks not only irresponsible but plain wrong.

Glenn Greenwald, who’s been dogging this controversy from the start, has more today, in the wake of an NPR report on the controversy.

What’s most interesting to me is Rosen’s attempt to wriggle out of responsibility for his poor judgment by dismissing his piece as mere “blogging”:

its author, the noted legal writer Jeffrey Rosen, says he’s been burned by the episode, too — enough that he’s swearing off blogging for good.

“It was a short Web piece,” Rosen says now, sounding a little shell-shocked. “I basically thought of it as a blog entry.”…

Rosen says he’s drawn a lesson from how his initial essay was treated by people of both ideological stripes. He won’t be blogging any more. He wants to spend more time with the material before hitting “send.”

So Rosen had written a 1000-word article for the New Republic website. But somehow he was seduced into lowering his standards by the nature of the medium!

In this ludicrous excuse Rosen resembles another New Republic scribe, that titan of responsibility-evasion Lee Siegel. Siegel, you’ll recall, was the hard-charging cultural critic who got caught in “sockpuppetry”: adopting a pseudonym in comment threads on his own writing so he could sing his own praises and slam his detractors. Then he wrote an angry book attacking the entire Web for its “thuggish anonymity,” and dismissed his own ethical lapse in one paragraph as a harmless little joke, a mere bagatelle. (I deal with Siegel’s case at greater length in Say Everything.)

Both these writers’ behavior displays a simple lack of respect for the form of blogging and for its practitioners. Instead of admitting, “I dropped my professional standards” or “I goofed,” their stance becomes “I visited the wrong part of town — hung out with the wrong crowd — I won’t be lowering myself again!”

In the Rosen-Siegel continuum, apparently, simply writing for the Web is a dangerous undertaking than can force otherwise high-minded and punctilious scribes to lose their ethical bearings. To blog is to slum, and risk staining your shirt. As Greenwald points out: “Countless people who write blogs every day — all year long — give ample thought before ‘hitting the send button,’ and do so without descending into irresponsible gossip-mongering and what The New York Times Editorial Page called ‘character assassination’ and ‘uninformed and mean-spirited chattering’ driven by ‘anonymous detractors’ that was ‘beyond the pale of reasonable debate.’ ”

While deepest in my book work over the past couple months I found it easier to stash links for future posting rather than to write real posts. So now I’ve got a backlog that I am going to unload here, in no particular order, and with no promise of timeliness.

If you’re reading this it means posting is working from my new computer.

Two amazing examples of the power of good graphic presentation: Here’s the most wonderful dynamic web-page chart showing the churning rise-and-fall of popularity in baby names, boy and girl, across 100 years. I don’t know where the data’s from — wait, I do, it’s from the Social Security Administration! — but it’s presented in a glorious interface (reminds me of Edward Tufte‘s beloved graphic of Napoleon’s Russian campaign). Go, type your name in, see how the mighty monikers rise and fall on the waves of human fickleness! [link courtesy Steven Johnson]

Over at Flickr, there’s this cool series of charts exploring the web of inter-relationships of users of that photo-sharing service. Interesting stuff for the online social anthropologists, but what I dig is the reflexivity: the study’s offered up as just one more batch of Flickr images.

The post below shows the result of using Radio’s “mail to blog” feature and
forgetting to turn off your e-mail “signature”. So the bad news is, my
phone line is now posted to the whole web, and I can’t edit it till I get
home. The good news is, I’m out of town and not there to take your call :-)

Still trying to fix my RSS feed. Life, late 2003…