Here’s looking at you, invitedmedia, discreet_chaos and Flotsam
Steve Safran September 30th, 2007
The NY Times has an article on the concept of blog commenters as their own shtick. It seems there are even blogs out there where people will fight to see who can come up with the most smart-assy of smart-ass comments. Imagine! (No need for that here, what with me being the Managing Editor of said responsibility.) The idea for the article is that blog commenters add to the life of the blog by becoming characters in the play. They inhabit roles - dramatis personae - in our little tragicomedies. Good idea for an article - or even a sophomore sociology paper - but the Times comes off … so… Timesy in its execution:
Since many blogs have a readership of one — or, at best, the writer, his mother and some guy he sat next to in seventh grade who found him on Google — piggybacking on a more popular site offers a wider audience for a keyboard jockey’s gripes and quips.
To paraphrase a well-worn observation: You ever notice how old people repeat themselves a lot?
7 Comments Add your own
1. Charles | September 30th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Aw, I’m a very minor recurring character in the tragicomedy that is Lost Remote! I wonder if I can put that on my resume?
2. Hussman | October 1st, 2007 at 6:11 am
;)
Or you can click on my name to hear the wise words of Coach McGurik about the NY Times.
3. Hussman | October 1st, 2007 at 6:12 am
Well, I guess URLs *aren’t* stripped by the SPAM filter… so now this makes three posts.
Guess which blog character I’ve become?
4. Safran | October 1st, 2007 at 7:32 am
The guy from Groundhog Day?
5. invitedmedia | October 1st, 2007 at 8:52 am
although that’s pretty good company, shame on those two if that’s what they were doing.
6. discreet_chaos | October 1st, 2007 at 1:30 pm
I’m not sure about some of the characterizations in the story and though it may apply to some other sites a little more than here, but there has to be something about community.
If you look at Gawker’s Jezebel, you’d see a great example of where there’s a site with some bloggers, but it’s the commenters who make it a community. That’s a little less true here, only because there’s just fewer of us frequent commenters, but hopefully those of us who do regularly participate are helping keep the conversation going and hopefully, we are adding to LR’s sense of community.
(Glad to be of service — Virtual beers all around)
7. Howard Owens | October 1st, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Old news late. This story is about four years old. Kind of tells you how far behind the times the Times is (and the rest of my newspaper colleagues.)
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