Blogging in a Time of Uncertainty...Blogroll Amnesty Now!

Happy Blogroll Amnesty Day folks; a day created and designed to tap, tap, tap on the glass ceiling created by those who, lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with a good idea, have pulled the ladder up after them. Jon Swift tells the story of the birth of this holiday in a great post here, and, as always, Skippy and Blue Gal join Jon in the remembrance of that day:

This past weekend Atrios, the proprietor of Eschaton, declared a Blogroll Amnesty Day, saying, "one of the big complaints by new bloggers is that it's impossible to get onto blogrolls because established bloggers tend not to add them."....snip....But the more I learned about this Amnesty Day, the more I realized that it was a very strange amnesty indeed. The amnesty he granted turned out to be amnesty for himself. He wanted to assuage himself of the guilt he might feel at kicking blogs off his blogroll instead of granting amnesty to others to swarm across the border into his domain. "Everyone feels a wee bit guilty about removing blogs from their blogroll, so they're hesitant to add new ones to an ever-expanding list," he explained. So Atrios deleted his entire blogroll and disappointingly repopulated it for the most part with the usual suspects. Then others in the liberal blogosphere followed his example, including Jesus' General and PZ Myers at Pharyngula, who already takes a very Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest approach to blogrolling (see updates below). Then Markos at Daily Kos joined this ruthless bloodletting. "It sucks and it feels bad," he said, daubing the tears from his eyes as he typed. So the end result of Atrios' Amnesty Day was to make some blogrolls smaller and even more exclusive than they already were.

I guess that this is the moment that I should say a little something about my sideways slide into writing about liberal politics. It just erupted like it did for so many, but I am a long format writer who does some big pieces here and there that consist on personal commentary and sometimes some deeper issue or story research stuff. My good friend Jill has been kind enough to allow me to post these things over at Brilliant at Breakfast where they fit well with her team's sensibility and the fact that there is a flow of information there. I cant in any way consider myself to be a blogger who sits every day and writes the news. There are plenty of people who do that much better than I ever could, and honestly, I'm just too slow and agonized to ever really pull that off. So, Ive been content to be what I am, which is a writer that tries to churn out what I can when I can. Over in my neck of the woods, things have slowed to a crawl lately due to some family matters that are ongoing and could go on for a week, a month, a year, who knows? It involves slow death, so I have given up pulling my hair out about how many stories are in edit mode and unpublished as the news turns over quickly, and just do what I can.

But that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the voices I've grown to rely on, the friends that Ive grown to love, the camaraderie that saved me from the voices in my head crying out to the TV screen as we plunged deeper and deeper into the abyss. I appreciate the big and the small voices, so long as they give me something new and interesting to chew on, and I really appreciate the raw talent that is out there waiting to be discovered. I do believe that we will soon be seeing the end of the media as we have known it, and that the cream rises naturally...unless there is a force stopping it.

I was pretty blind to the politics of political blog writing when I stumbled into a Yearly Kos one year and watched the circus unfold complete with entourages and geek stardom...I dunno...it was like going to the origami convention with my son and watching the origami geeks fawn over some Japanese guy who can fold a dragon really well. And like anything else, I found it sorta funny in a pop culture way, because I was raised in a real old time showbiz family and have spent time not only on movie sets and in the company of those that our culture deems to be "stars," but in the company of really talented people who were less recognized outside of intellectual circles. I grew up in a highly dysfunctional, very intellectual setting, and as surely as J.D. Salinger wrote the story of every boy's life above my garage here, and my grandfather employed a stable of writers that ranged from black listed pseudonyms, to world renown novelists, to Academy Award winners, I found it rich that the self dubbed kings and queens of blogtopia (tm Skippy) were lording over their little kingdom there in the lobby of a hotel, as if they were the new Woodward and Bernstein's of our time. That's not to say that I wasn't blown away to be in a ballroom with some writers that I really admire and a few that covered and broke very important stories in the unraveling of the lies of the Bushies. But surely some of these star bloggers were just in the right place at the right time, and surely alot of them had become popular because of the community they created, which as great as that is, rides on the backs of every member of the community and less on the actual talent of the creator. I wasn't interested in the hits and growth of blogging during that time, and I remain disinterested in that, except for this thing that is ongoing in which some very, very talented people are held back from the big show because the big boys don't want to let go a little and give a hand up. Hardworking tremendously talented folks are not linked to or blogrolled because they represent competition that the biggies don't want, even as they move on in the natural evolution of their careers.

There used to be a certain cultural cache in being the patron of new talent. I'm not sure how that works anymore because it seems like anymore you have to get through so much shit to get to Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul. Usually this involves a pit of muck, eating bugs, or a viral YouTube winning out over anything real. But what floors me is that these normal, if regularly intelligent, news people deem themselves worthy of controlling not only what new voices get through to the mainstream but that they, like the main stream that they were supposedly fighting against, seem to have hooked together into a network to homogenize the stories getting out there. It was never more apparent than it was during this past year when whole huge blogs were supporting one candidate over another, and commentators reduced themselves to a gang of thugs, threatening those who dared speak up for the other candidate. So much for the alternative media and the free flow of ideas on the Internets.


Its not that I think that any one of them is any less talented than the great news people of our times, but I do begrudge them the power to decide who gets in the club based not on writing or reporting skill but on...what?..referral? friendship? commentators on their blogs who don't represent competition.
Here's the thing, the big boys deserve their spot because they were there, they had guts, and they were clever enough to build their empires. Some of it was luck, but the rest was scrappy hard work; and I appreciate that. The problem is that historically there has been no newsroom where there wasn't a young upcoming reporter who wanted a foot in the door and who made it by investing the time and talent in a possible career that might pay off. The older reporters welcomed these youngsters because someone would have to carry on...right? What are the big boys so afraid of? If they were sure of their own talent they would surely extend a hand of friendship to us all, wouldn't they?

Here we are in the age of information technology where there is plenty of room and readership for everyone, the cream always rises to the top, and the big boys are moving into TV punditry, radio, and book writing, but they still want to keep their place on the top. Could it be that that rising cream might, in comparison, reveal who is a hack and who is just riding along on the community? Could it be ad revenue driving this? Wouldn't more talent in the immediate pool equal more hits? I don't know, but I do smile when I think of the geekdom out there surrounded by their entourages, in a heaven that they never could have imagined: Stardom!! Popularity!!

So next comes the big shakeout; Bush is gone and there is less to write about. Maybe some of us want to explore other interests that were overshadowed by the need to cover what the main stream was not looking at. Maybe some of that talent is splitting off, leaving the hard core political minds. Still, after all of these years the big boys club wants to stay exclusive on their mailing lists and blogrolls? Isn't it a little stale in there by now?

What am I reading these days? This is what the B.A.D is all about, isn't it? I have to say that I jump around to read columnists quite a bit, and I don't believe that any of them are worth mentioning here because they are all well known, thank-you-very-much. I also have an incredible, insatiable interest in tech of all kinds, so I spend way too much time on the blogs and podcasts of our geeky cousins who have made all of this information sharing possible. And then there are the birds; anyone who knows me or my blog, knows that I am a bird person and I breed and raise parrots and keep chickens (along with dogs and a menagerie of interesting creatures too numerous to name here,) so I am on those sites as well.

But liberal politics still has my ear, and as I settle into a slightly relieved stance around the Obama Administration, I am less about criticizing every move that I don't approve of in what is going to be a painful recovery, than I am about justice for the injured world and whats left behind in the streets of America (not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan,) in the rubble of the Bush days....and how could it be that half of Americans still wouldn't look at what was going on until the 11th hour when it was basically too late to salvage much. So Obama can stop digging and we can look up out of the hole and start to figure ways to climb, but its much worse than it had to be. My interest is in what happened in the American psyche that allowed us to turn away from each other, and who we are as Americans, in fear or greed or any number of reasons, none of which are an excuse for whats happened. This is what I hope to find in smaller voices out there. Because while the big boys scramble to maintain their perch on top, like Yertle the Turtle, hoarding all they can see, it might behoove them to look down and see who is below. Some of us have harder shells than others, and some are breathing down the necks of the establishment, as the foundation of media as we know it cracks every day.

So, in the tradition of B.A.D. I will be reading only small and tiny blogs and sharing what I find here...hopefully...in order to bring to light what is up and coming and new and wired in the new world that we are building in the rubble of the Bush Administration. I wont disallow tech blogs because I think that we will see an explosion of the new technology in live streaming and multimedia experiences replacing television, magazines and newspapers. I think this is going to happen much sooner than anyone could guess...its actually happening as I type this.
Check back between now and Tuesday for some links to what may well be the future of all this and hopefully some smaller voices needing some linky love...and thanks again to Jon, Skippy, and Blue Gal, for keeping an eye out for the little guy.