Open letter to Doc Searls & Hugh MacLeod

Apr 6th, 2008 | By Steven Hodson | Category: The Social Web

We the undersigned A lot of bandwagon type crap has been going on over the NYT post about bloggers who are blogging themselves to death which as I pointed out in my post on the subject was nothing more than Globe slash Enquirer headline stupidity. Throughout all this piling on there is a much more important story that seems to be floating under the radar of just about everyone in the tech blogosphere. It is a story that for me has much more importance on the blogosphere moving forward than any NYT scaremonger type headlines.

The first part of the story was brought to my attention in a post by a very good friend where he related a couple of messages posted to Twitter by Hugh MacLeod

Then Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid declared (twittered actually) …

@armanoThe truth is, I’m too freaking busy to keep the Blogosphere happy, all the time, day in day out, for years on end. 11:54 AM April 03, 2008 from web in reply to Armano Icon_star_empty
Sorry, Gang, I just don’t think I can do the “Blogosphere” thing any more. Gonna do something else. Already doing it, actually. 11:44 AM April 03, 2008 from web Icon_star_empty

The idea that Hugh is even considering giving up blogging was a shock to the system but when it was followed up with a post from Doc Searls on his blog

Blogging today ain’t what it was when Dave started it, and when I followed in his footsteps. The kind of writing we both try to do — what I once called “making and changing minds” (including our own) — is an ever more narrowing slice of the whole, even if the amount of it is still going up.

So I want something new. Something for which the making of money is at most a secondary or lower priority. Not sure what that should be, but I am sure, if it ever happens, it won’t be called blogging.

I don’t know about you but to have either; or both, of these bloggers even considering the idea of stepping away from the blogosphere is inconceivable for me. After all both these men have had a great impact on the blogosphere with their wit and wisdom.

Hugh by the power of even one single cartoon post on his blog could very well be the driving force behind the willingness of a major corporation to totally re-evaluate the way they do business on the consumer level. Not many men can lay claim to the power of a few lines of ink to change a corporate mindset.

With Doc Searls there has always been a dignified and intelligent discourse; whether you have agreed with him or not. He has always been held with high regard within the tech blogosphere because he never felt the need to belittle or insult anyone in order to get his point across.

Both these gentlemen; and I use the word in its truest sense,  have been a guiding force for all bloggers new and old that success; both personally and financially, isn’t predicated on being the first to post or having the most eye catching headline. They have shown us that blogging is more than all of that. They are living proof that blogging can indeed be about having conversations.

I truly hope that both these men have a change of heart because there is still so much more that the rest of us bloggers can learn from them and I still think that there is still much more they have to offer the tech blogosphere on a whole.

By losing one or both of these gentlemen bloggers we will lose more than just two unique voices from the blogosphere we will also be losing two of the best role models any blogger could have.

Stupid NYT headlines pale in comparison to this real news.

In the end I really hope that Doc Searls and Hugh MacLeod reconsider these separate decision

[tags]blogosphere, bloggers, Doc Searls, Hugh MacLeod[/tags]

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Viewing 7 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Thanks for your kind and thoughtful words.

    To clarify things a bit, I'm not thinking of stepping away from the blogosphere, even as I look forward to progress along technological paths toward better tools for writing and sharing than blogging tools currently provide.

    We can do better than Moveable Type and Wordpress. In fact, we *did* do better, in some important and overlooked ways, with Dave Winer's Manila and Radio Userland. It's going on two decades since MORE came along, and there has never been a better writing tool since. I still miss it every day.

    If those tools are as radically different as blogging tools were, we'll have something new. Otherwise, we'll still have blogging, which will still have plenty of good stuff, even if it's a shrinking percentage of the whole.

    To Carleton Benjamin: "The blogosphere" is not one thing, nor did more than a small part of it react with "sore and raging petulance". Also, the Times piece was not an "examination" except by a large stretch. It also mistook the few for the whole, and damned the whole by association. As Dave Winer said somewhere else, the Times was talking to itself on that one. Or worse, trolling.

    Deaths and heart attacks happen to people of all ages, bloggers included.

    For what it's worth, I'm 60, and I would say that blogging on the whole is a positive part of my lifestyle. (And a negative one, to the extent it increases my tendency to be a desk potato.) If I croak next week, though, please don't blame it on blogging. I have more than enough true vices to blame.
    • ^
    • v
    Thank you very much Doc for taking some time to drop by and clarifying what may have been a misconception on my part based on the original post; and I for one am glad that you will not be leaving the "blogosphere" behind.

    It is people like you, Hugh and many of the other originators of what I consider to be true blogging that keeps me going sometimes when faced with the 'headline hunter' type bloggers that grab all the readership and sometimes give such a false impression of how easy it is - which it isn't.
    • ^
    • v
    The sad part is that the headlines would read "Blogged to death" or something similarly silly,... truth be damned.
    • ^
    • v
    This might actually be a *good* thing for what we refer to today as the "blogosphere", because where ever these two go, they'll continue to inform and to influence but they will also (almost certainly!) break new ground; others will follow and the conversation evolves again.
    • ^
    • v
    i read your post carefully. but i must disagree - and i hope we can disagree civilly. the nyt piece has been sorely misrepresented to the point of caricature. you really distort the article in a way that reduces the piece to national inquirer status. sorry but that's not at all the case. if the "blogosphere" reacts with sore and raging petulance to any examination by the MSM, then you know what? it really ain't worth saving and its critics are right about it being populated by a small collection of self-absorbed twits mewling for each other in an echo chamber. personally, i don't subscribe to that POV. but to see the piling on in techmeme - and i read nearly all the posts - well, it was simply ridiculous.
    • ^
    • v
    Disgreeing civilly is something that I try very hard to do especially when the person I am disagreeing with is being civil in the first place. As for distorting the article I would beg to disagree because the word blogger could have been echanged out for any other type of profession .. regardless of the profession it was written to be an attention grabber with no substances that couldn't be applied to any other profession.
    • ^
    • v
    i think the point the bloggers were making (which you obviously missed in reading "nearly all the posts") was this:

    They don't need "saving".

    ... the NYT wants you to think they do, hehehe, because it takes focus away from the fact that their stone aged institution is the only thing in any real immediate danger. (Of course it had to be the NYT... the ONE newspaper that probably will still be around in 10 years... although, oddly enough, it will be a blog. They might try to call it something else... but it will be a blog IF [and that is a very big if] it survives.) I wonder how many "real journalists" have died in the past 12 months... why doesn't the NYT make a spectacle of them? Why don't they warn their own industry against the dangers of deadline stress and middle of the night re-writes under extreme pressure to get the presses up and running again. Speaking of presses... let's talk about the stress in the print plant ... i've worked there, I know how it gets.... WAY more stressful than the web, hmm kay. Careers are all stressful and everybody dies, simply no exceptions whatsoever. The Times' piece was a total fluff job and the writer knows it, the blogosphere knows it, my freaking mom knows it, the only person who missed that fact was you. Sorry if that wasn't conducted "civilly" enough... but hey, saying "it really ain't worth saving" isn't exactly very diplomatic, so I guess I'm about as sorry as the NYT is for publishing the article in the first place. ;)

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