Jeff Atwood on a Monday Morning
Here is a little American ditty from the Joel-on-Software camp:
I believe very strongly that a blog without comments is not a blog. For me, the whole point of this blogging exercise is the many-way communication of the comments—between me and the commenters, and among the commenters themselves.
I deliberately use the word “American” because, since the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, pop life is the only life. When you lose the popularity contest, you are then a general purpose loser. Of course, Black history will reveal that popularity contests—like elections—can be rigged, biased and bamboozled. And it is a natural evolution of the indigenous respect for authentic living that the very Greek concept of “populous” is more deadly than lively—more related to captivity than an exciting “modern life” in the big city.
Meanwhile back in the “real world”: Losing the popularity contest means “no one” leaves comments on your Blog post. However, experience informs me that 0 comments can mean more than being loser:
- Many of the people who read kintespace.com Blog posts don’t even know what a Blog is (really) and the concept of leaving a comment is just not even there. This is just another figment of oppression: I know several highly educated people of color who are just getting used to the ability to speak out—to respond in public—instead of swaddling up inside of an institutional bubble and expressing themselves inside the Big House.
- Many of the tech-savvy people of color who would be theoretically biased to participate in a kinté space community are of a small population that is stretched too thin over thousands of Black and black-like Blog writers. There just simply is not enough free time in the work day to leave comments on every brown-eyed journal. I am guilty of this.
- Many of the tech-savvy people of color who would be theoretically biased to participate in a kinté space community earned such a white-science-based education through a missionary process of total assimilation—so these folks are “too smart” to pay my Blog any (open, public, honest, courageous) attention. Some of you attended UCSB with me in the Reagan 1980s and you know who you are…
- Many people who call themselves “white” and know very well what a Blog post is, are “too smart” to leave comments on my Blog. These people do not agree with “my politics” and they take a page out of the Reagan-revolution Play Book and do the “smart” thing: ignore me. I write shit like this not to help turn someone’s life around to my supposed advantage but just to record my awareness of this situation and encourage others, who truly care, to study my reaction to this situation. This might be your cue to laugh and say, “Dude, what’s he talking about?”
- Most people who leave comments are not really talking to the author. They are talking to the author’s big ass audience under the guise wanting genuine dialog. When a person like me (with my so-called “politics”) has a big-ass audience, the white world as we know would have come to an unsustainable, global-warming, genetically-modified end. I would not be very happy to suddenly have this huge audience because most of them would be in the throes of apocalyptic terror, chock full of gnashing of teeth and all that four-horsemen shit.I have followed popular Blog personalities for years now and almost all of these popular people—especially the people in silicon-based technologies—have preexisting old-school social connections that have nothing to do with how LisaNova blew up. All you need to be is an employee or a friend of an employee of a popular company (like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sun, etc.) with decent American-style social skills to get a “respectable” audience. And this employee connection is rather low-brow. What is more is to be a socially-skilled, hard-working pal of freelancers like Martin Fowler, Joel Spolsky, Tim O’Reilly, Andy Warhol, etc. Another angle is to come from mainstream television/radio/film with a healthy respect for new media like Leo Laporte (he tops my list of internet personalities). And the best (or often the worst) angle beaming into the huddled masses is to simply be first like Carl Franklin, Dave Winer (or Paul Prescod, “Dude, who’s he?”).