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The New Gatekeepers: Follow up
February 14, 2006
The first rule of blogging should be: don’t start a conversation unless you have the time to participate into it. When I posted my entry on the new gatekeepers, I did not expect to get that much interest. I’ve been wrong before but this time, I’m amazed by how wrong I was.
Genesis of a controversy
Before I go into the specific of the entry, let me go about how it got there in the first place. The issue arose out of my own concern as I rise up the ranks in the blogosphere. For a few years now, I’ve been publishing on this blog. Two years ago, I made a single change to how I was approaching my blog publishing: instead of trying to cover the same thing as everyone else, I decided to create original material that no one else was doing. I figured that, if I reduced the amount of overlap with others, I would get traffic since the blogosphere was supposed to be egalitarian in nature. For the most part of a year, nothing really happened in terms of traffic growth. I then figured that I needed to “market” my entries. As I was reading a lot of blogs (anywhere between 250-300 blogs), I figured I could start pinging people about stuff that was relevant to them and their concerns. I started emailing people when I wrote an entry that I thought might interest them or their readers: a simple message along the lines of “here’s something that may interest you or your readers” and adding that I would appreciate a link back. Attached to my message was the URL of the entry and the full text for the entry itself. All of a sudden, I noticed that my link flow started growing. From there, a logical conclusion started to form: it wasn’t enough to just write a blog, one needed to also market posts.
Along the way, I picked up extra subscribers and started receiving emails from other bloggers who wanted me to talk about their own blog entry. I was now part of the conversation flow. Along with it came things like invitations to closed betas, and discussions (on email) of certain aspects of my entries. Think of it as private coaching that I was receiving as an insider. However, I did not lose my populist streak and felt that I needed to find a way to get more people involved in the discussions I was creating.
As an avowed subscriber to “The Cluetrain Manifesto” line of thinking, I believed that links subverted hierarchies. In the process, I started looking at links in search engines and posted a few entries on the subject, alerting A through Z lists of bloggers whom I read to the list of people I pinged about my entries. Traffic continued to flow.
Some of this opened a lot of invisible doors, one of which was from Microsoft. I went to the Search Champs gathering and got into an interesting debate with Gary Flake and Robert Scoble about how egalitarian the blogosphere was. Robert brought up an interesting point: if there are Gatekeepers, explain how someone like Michael Arrington, of Tech Crunch, could have become a member of the A-list blogging set in under a year. It was a question for which I didn’t have an answer, until recently.
The Wall Street Journal wrote about the FON issue and I thought it fell somewhere along the same lines of the issues I had with the blogosphere: there I was, a former Z-list member now thrust into some C-list or better status and my own thinking was going to have an impact. If I posted something and the right people pointed to it, I was pretty much guaranteed some hearing in places like Memeorandum, which itself translated into more traffic and thus more influence.
This algorithmic approach bugged me to some extent. As a long time reader of Seth Finkelstein’s blog, I was aware of some of the arguments around the power laws and the nature of blogging and yet, Seth seemed to be a lonely voice. I thought that I could use my new-found influence to foster another debate that might help highlight people like Seth and others concerned with those issues.
I wrote the entry and fired off an email to bloggers who may be interested.
The controversy starts
Doc Searls was among the first people to add to the debate in a well thought out analysis of my post. As a rebuke, he wrote :
But the Internet blew away the porches of membership. You don’t need to bark at a door you can just as easily walk around.
The truth, though is that the way one walks around is to entice bloggers like Doc to link to them in some way. This is precisely the problem, in my view. As long as the gatekeepers are good (and, I do truly believe that the current lists of blog that matter are fielded by good people), that’s not a problem. But what if that were to change? My fear is not for now, as there seems to be a way to walk around the door but what happens when a majority of top bloggers become so deluged with email from people like myself that they stop linking to those blogs? What if, to use an extreme example, some influential blogger were to ask other bloggers to declare some kind of link fatwah on a particular blogger?
For people like myself, it’s not as much of an issue as I’ve developed my own eco-system, now having reach a level where I might be able to have some level of influence in my own community. But what about new bloggers?
Seth wrote a rebuke to Doc’s entry in which he concluded
The critique of gatekeepers often has an underlying message, that reformers need to face these problems of differences in power and grapple with them directly. Technology will not make it all go away. And that’s a very hard message indeed.
This went deeper into what I was wondering about. How do we face those problems and how do we solve them?
Scott Karp went even further calling Doc’s response defensive and, in another post, adding:
I think the term “gatekeepers” just offends bloggers’ liberatarian sensibilities, but regardless, the existence of gatekeepers in a structured information system is axiomatic.
In There’s nothing wrong with gatekeepers, he concluded:
So if you’re a gatekeeper, you should embrace it and use your power wisely.
Clarification increased in my own mind. Gatekeepers may be part of human nature and not something we can work around: we, as human beings, are wired into needing some sort of filter (a belief that seems to be shared by Conrad Strydom of Geekspin). And people who have been assigned the role (for I do not believe it’s a role one can bestow on himself or herself), it comes with great responsibilities.
Doc then pointed out in offense post that
I have this idea that the blogosphere is the one place in the world or perhaps an entirely new world, or a part of a new world, created on the Net where there is no need for class, for caste, for gates or keepers of anything.
While I hate getting this argument going any further, while it is nice to have such aspiration, I believe that there is a gap between what we hope for and the reality we liev in. I, too, would love a new world where that were true but the reality is that we are setting up new gatekeepers and here’s the big conundrum: Hyperlinks were supposed to subvert hierarchies but algorithmic calculations like PageRank or the technorati algorithm are reinforcing them. (Shelley at BurningBird noticed the irony in the fact that Doc’s blog response was ranked higher than the original message from Seth)
Kent Newsome had an interesting post in which he seemed to take up my defense based on a post Dave Winer made (memo to Dave: I wasn’t even thinking about you when I posted the entry as I consider you one of the good guys in this, linking liberally to people high and low). But Dave made an interesting point, what were my motivations for the post? I hadn’t really thought about motivations beyond getting people to talk about the issue and figure out if there was a way to fix it. It’s a problem; It needs a fix; I don’t have it; maybe I can mine the collective wisdom of the blogosphere and help advance the discussion. By no mean do I think that a solution will be found this time around but, like all good discussion, some points will become clearer. What I like about Dave is that he doesn’t varnish things: some people find it abrasive but Dave has a way of moving the conversation or the advances forward and I think that he may be on to something: was I whining? I don’t know, I didn’t feel like I was. But was that the perception?
That was the first problem with the entry. Kent Newsome also took me to task for not linking to other blogs:
And while I agree much of what Tristan says, I can’t help but notice that he linked to no other blogs, A-List or otherwise, in his post. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, but for some reason I find it interesting.
He’s right on this, I was part of the problem in that particular entry. This highlights one of my own failing in dealing with writing a blog: I should definitely link more often (and I will, going forward) as I’m closing the door on many people with interesting comments. Kent concludes
There’s no easy fix for these problems. The best we can do is try to be inclusive and reward others who are inclusive with our eyeballs, our links and our appreciation.
And write hard. Every day.
It is exactly because there are no easy fix that this is an interesting problem. Maybe a collective effort can help advance a solution. I know I’ll be thinking about problem some more. As far as writing hard, I’m OK with that. However, I may be failing in that I don’t have it in me to write something interesting every day. So, instead of repeating what others have written, I’d rather stay quiet until I have something I think may be original (and the blogosphere being as wide and diverse as it is, it is very hard to inject original ideas, a clear proof of that being that Jon Garfunkel wrote a much better entry on the Gatekeepers subject than I can ever hope to.)
Rafe Colburn takes the debate to a meta level, linking it far beyond the blogosphere:
The furor that has arisen over the offensive editorial cartoons is an example of what happens when gatekeepers misuses their influence.
It’s an interesting co-relation and while this hasn’t happened yet, why are we all certain that it won’t happen in the blog world? What makes the blogosphere so different that it would ensure against misuse of influence? Is it because there are so many bloggers and the system becomes self correcting? I don’t know but those are new questions that he brings up and will need more answers in the future. As I’ve been saying before, I don’t have the answers on this either.
Mike Stopforth brings up the next challenge in application design:
So the challenge now is learning the skills to harness the real value of the people’s Internet. And for me, therein lies the challenge of the second-generation Web. We may have developed the tools to empower ordinary people to become globally-capable publishers, but we have not yet learnt how to communicate the benefits and accessibility of those platforms. Our ability to do that will make or break this evolutionary stage of information distribution.
As I was putting away books over the weekend, I was thinking about this too and was wondering whether the amount of writing one does should be taken account when assessing the value of a blog. Frequent posters of long entries should probably get some type of weighting added. This could help increase the visibility of some lines of thoughts from people further down the list.
Long thoughful posts probably should get higher levels since they give more thoughts (for example, I’m thinking here of posts like Dave Winer’s post on friendship which was buried on his wordpress blog and probably would have gotten more flow on the scripting news site. This is an interesting case in that Dave is a top blogger but some of his best content is on a site that is not as well known as his main one.)
Maybe it would be something that could be built in one of the aggregators we all love (someone, and my apologies for not remembering who but if you’re that person, please email me or post in the comments and I will update the link, mentioned they wanted to get Memeorandum for their newsreader: it’s a great idea and I’d like that too).
Also, in the comments, Dave Weinberger points out:
I think your use of the term “gatekeeper,” though, may skew what you’re saying. It’s a term from the previous model when few were allowed to publish. If you found a more apt metaphor and did a search and replace, I wonder if that would change the feel or substance of this piece.
That’s a very good question. Are the gates in my own mind here (are we just held back by our own gatekeepers?) It’s a tough question that needs reflection.
Finally, reading through the last entries linking to this, Phil Sim urges us to look beyond Memeorandum and Kent Newsome does a nice round-up post of all the discussions.
I’d like to thank all the people who have participated in the discussion. They’ve helped me sharpen my own thinking and left me with much to think about (and hopefully, I’ll come up with other material for future posts from this discussion). Obviously, I touched on some raw nerve in the blogosphere with the post and I’ve learned a hard lesson: next time you’re going to do something that may be provocative, make sure you have the bandwidth to get involved into further discussions.
