I do like David Weinberger, here being interviewed at Rebecca's Pocket:
How much traffic do you get?
I genuinely do not track it. I don't have the slightest idea. I don't have any meters in place and I never ever check my Technorati ranking or any of the others. I couldn't give you a guess reliable within several orders of magnitude.Why don't you track it?
In small part on principle. In main part for pragmatic reasons. I would be affected by the numbers either way, and neither effect would be helpful. If I were a bigger person, I wouldn't care. But I do. So I don't check.What principle?
That we shouldn't be writing blogs in order to gain a mass market. And we shouldn't be evaluating blogs and bloggers by how many people read them.Why shouldn't we?
Because I'd like to see the broadcast strategy get a real alternative not just in who the stars are but in the star system entirely.What alternative do you envision?
What we have: a gazillion bloggers, almost all of whom are writing for a small group of readers. …How does your offline input contribute to your blogging?
A lot of our culture is in books that are either not online or too hard to read online. … Offline works often provide the impetus for a post — for example, it's hard for me to get through an issue of The Boston Globe without a mental list of things I really ought to blog about. But, by the time I get to my computer — a 15 second walk — I've usually forgotten all of them, which is a good thing. We get to take long walks through offline books. I find that that's good for maintaining and expanding the ol' context.Whose writing do you particularly admire?
… I will say that that Shakespeare guy has a way with a phrase.Why do you blog?
I blog because I tried it out and liked it. I like it because it gets me into conversations and it builds friendships. I like it because I like writing. I like it because it stimulates me so much that I jump out of bed in the morning to get started. Also, I have some obsessive-compulsive tendencies.How has your weblog changed your life?
Blogging has made me fat. I used to exercise in the morning. Now I blog. It's connected me to people I care about. I'm over-stimulated intellectually. There's too much to read, think about, and write about.
The star system challenged — word-smithery as acts of honesty where we're so used to the emperor's clothes and other lies.
And much more besides: eg, 'For me, a community is a group of people who care about one another more than they have to'.
As for that Shakespeare guy, these lines have been much in my head this week:
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
Sonnet 65
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