This is what Jessica Coen, an A-list blogger, looks like. Get a sex
change or a dye job but this is the necessary look to emulate for blog
success.
There's a relatively gay article about how a few precious
bloggers went from blog rags to riches in the recent issue of New York Mag.
We're going to live-blog our bile as we read it. Since we're in the admittedly
enviable position of getting paid to blog already, we think the sour-grapes
odor that would normally stink up such an endeavor will be absent. We suggest
you look at the article here in a new window and resize your windows so you can
see the offending article and our commentary side-by-side.
8:46 pm - Decide to do what we're doing.
8:46 pm - Who cares about Jossip?
8:47 - "Was steaming along nicely," certainly the
use of passive voice is unnecessary.
8:48 - Talk of audience share and comparison to Gawker.
"He was earning a comfortable 5 figure salary but not millions, what the darn, this is a glass ceiling." No it's not, shutup you tard. You mean he
didn't have a multi-blog network to trade traffic back and forth from, he
didn't have an eccentric rich backer, and he was inspired by Gawker's tone and
style and he emulated it, a blog that was the vanguard for its niche and scope,
and he hasn't surpassed its success? Damn, life is so unfair. There must be
something wrong with the so called magic of this so called blogging so-called
thing. Will NY Mag tell us? We must read on.
8:51 - Glancing over above comments we realize
we still hate magazines. What is it about glossy paper that engenders this
tabloid mentality, this gushing way of presenting secret information they've
dug up, this way of making you feel bad about your pitiful life? We hate
magazines.
8:54 - "But if you talk to many of today’s bloggers,
they’ll complain that the game seems fixed. They’ve targeted one of the more
lucrative niches—gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course)—yet they
cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It’s as if
there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs—then
hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out
why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work.
“It just seems like it’s a big in-party,” one blogger complained to me." Who are these blog losers? Maybe they should learn to write
better or learn how to find stories better and faster than other blogs and then
share the information with higher profile blogs in their niche. Yes, it's a big
in-party of people who are obsessed at being good at what they do. If you want
in, get obsessed. The Spunker was started by an outsider newbie and rose to a position of some renown within
5 months. We certainly didn't
do it by bitching about not getting enough trackbacks.
8:58 - We don't think dramatic lighting suits Jesse Oxfeld.
However, Jessica Coen looks quite wanton. Why must mainstream media continually objectify her? Is it a desperate attempt to sexify a medium suffering from a severe glamour and glitz nadir? Or are they telling us their readers are shallow and superficial? Or does everyone just jones for Jess?
8:59 - "Then he counted an interesting metric: the number
of links that pointed toward each site (“inbound” links, as they’re
called)." Gee, that sounds like a fun metric. I wonder how he thought of
using it. Technorati, what?
9:00 - We note the article title again, "Blogs to
Riches: The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom" and are further
convinced it is a stupid title.
9:01 - "The A-list is teensy, the B-list is bigger, and
the C-list is simply massive. In the blogosphere, the biggest audiences—and the
advertising revenue they bring—go to a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in
total obscurity." You could apply this evaluation to fucking anything.
Every category has its elite. Yes, the cost of entry to blogging is near zero.
Yes, it is democratic. Yes there is elitism, an elitism that is based on a
meritocracy.
9:03 - Has this guy ever read the Tipping Point or he just
discovering this shit on his own, like that guy who invented calculus in a hut
in
9:05 - Why is there a pic of Joshua Michael Mitchell next to
a paragraph lead about Peter Rojas?
9:08 - Can we please shutup about Calacanis? Weblogs Inc
sucks! No one actually reads that drivel, he's just managed to inject a
misperception of his "network's" "value" into mainstream
journalists clouded noggins.
9:13 - No bile for the past five minutes. The 40 of
Balantine is settling in much like the NY mag article's author is into some not
as annoying notions about how blogging actually works.
9:17 - Elizabeth Spiers, blah blah blah yay blogging. Done.
The Spunker recipe for blog success: Mock people and things more well known
than you. Post it. Tell the people you mocked about it. Post their responses.
Post your response. Etc. We can't believe we just spent 31 minutes on this crap
and will spend another 5-10 editing. Thank you NY Mag, you are the queen of
pad.
9:36 - After doing some editing it occurs to us that it is furthermore gay that the author, Clive Thompson, should pretend to be shocked and appalled and concerned and confused by blogs, only to reveal himself to be a sometimes BoingBoinged and Gawker blogger whom Nick Denton allegedly calls to toss his salad "pick his brain." That doesn't seem very honest transparent and bloggerly. [edit: 7:39 am]
I don't like her personal sense of style and her taste in hats.
Posted by: rikki | 03/23/2006 at 08:24 PM
this post scares me.
Posted by: copyranter | 02/14/2006 at 04:51 PM
you can never get enough Jessica Coen:-)
Posted by: Steve Hall | 02/14/2006 at 12:12 AM
"Get a sex change or a dye job but this is the necessary look to emulate for blog success."
Too fucking true. "Yes, I want to be taken seriously as a journalist. Oh, by the way, does my hair spill across my jacket the right way?"
Posted by: makethelogobigger | 02/13/2006 at 11:49 PM
Why can't I be cool like you?
Posted by: Wisey | 02/13/2006 at 10:09 PM