Now, in some community or another, there was a discussion about ages on LJ. The modal age is the 16-18 range. Yes, we are swamped with more people in that one range than any other- however, the actual average age is closer to 24- perhaps higher, since LJ doesn't keep stats for people over 55. Despite the sterotypes, LJ is not swamped by teenagers with posts consisting of OMG!!! LOLO!!!11!
There's been a great many of these articles cropping up lately. And yet, in contrast, PR companies are advising Fortune 1000 compaines about how to properly legally attack bloggers. What? you say. If bloggers are such narcisitic wankers, then why on earth would F1000 companies care what we do?
The fact is, people post in blogs because there are other people who listen. There are people who actually do have an interest in what you had for breakfast. Why? I haven't a fucking clue, but they're there. There's at least one person out there that reads what you write. And there's at least one person that reads what that person writes.
Which is what causes propogation through the blogosphere. Some originator posts a link, someone takes that link and posts it as well, and within a few hours, major news stories are broken in the blogosphere. And there's a shitload of noise generated in the process- which is what people like Mr. Loker can always point at to show that blogging is stupid. Because, in terms of effeciency, blogging is horrible- the amount of noise generated is powers of ten greater than the actual signal that gets through.
Then again- we're getting increasingly powerful filtering tools, in the form of News Aggregators, readership pressure, centralized group-blogs- we're getting the ability to filter out that noise without any real difficulty. But then again, if you're not "in the scene" so to speak, you don't really see that.
This ties back to my earlier post today about Internet Infocracy- the information you distribute is your service, and the payment you get is in the form of linkbacks, page ranks, and Blogosphere clout- the better and more interesting that information is, the more clout you get. Hell, people make money from blogging. I would, if I could find a way to sneak ads into my LJ style- but all the major adsites involve Javascript.
Speaking of, I'm going to go gut my style I think. I'm sick of it. Gonna ditch component and go to something else, something open source, so that I can have an easier time hacking the code manually.
Another note- I've noticed I've been doing alot of twofer posts- two completely unrelated topics. *shrug*
