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Blogebrity's Sticky Trap: L.A. Blog Gossip
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1700 Reads
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 If LAVoice jumped the shark more than a year ago and blogging has jumped the shark a hundred times over since, then it's probably about time for the age of Blogebrity, a gossipy site about bloggers.
Meet the new medium, same as the old medium: unable to come up with anything original, blogging as a culture is aping the cult of personality found in movies, TV and music.
Only Blogebrity is more of an experimental art/tech project - a petri dish synthetically infected with the exotic virus of an idea (blog fame) by Eyebeam.org, the same web/multimedia collective that brought us the election season's brilliant Fundrace.org. What has this got to do with Los Angeles?
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In addition to the blogebrity blog, there is "The List" - an artificial caste system with no discernible set of rules.
The "A List" holds the big names in blogging, including L.A. luminaries like Xeni Jardin, Sean "blogging.la/metblogs" Bonner, Wil Wheaton, Mickey Kaus, Arianna Huffington and Tony Pierce.
The "B-List" includes Kevin Roderick, BoifromTroy, Marc Cooper, Luke Ford, Charles Johnson, Jeff Koga, Moxie, Dave Navarro (listed twice), Cathy Seipp, Matt Welchand, um, LAVoice.org - listed as "Reed, Mack" even though this is a community blog.
And then there's the "C-List" folk, who include Professor Bainbridge, Will Campbell, Kitty Bukkake, Brian Flemming, Joz, Rosie O'Donnell, Marleigh Riggins and Adrienne Crew from LAIst and Luke Y. Thompson.
After I stumbled across my mystifying placement there via Technorati, I began wondering - how the hell did I get on the list? Why are Johnson and Roderick in B and not A? What the hell am I doing in B instead of Flemming and Thompson? And why is there no sign of important players like Jonah, and prominent voices like Patterico or ArmedLiberal? Why did LAist Jason Toney get a B-listing while his LAist colleagues got Cs?
You can nominate yourself. They're launching a dead-tree magazine, but there's no indication of price, format, content or even intent, beyond a cover-splash and email signup list and the vague promise "Coming May 19, 2005."
And there are wacky popularity polls by which the visitors of the site purport to tell each other who's most important.
Once you start to play this game, you realize you're being gamed. Eyebeam has loosed another virulent brainworm of a meme - one that will grow and self-propagate as Fundrace did, and take on a life of its own.
On the other hand, as any blogger will tell you, the minute you start believing the world view of a single web site - particularly its views on the importance of other individuals in your world, you're hosed. And you have to give a wry little chuckle and walk the hell away as fast as you can.
Forget it, Jake. It's the blogosphere.
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Wednesday, June 01, 2005 - 10:25 PM
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