notforprophet

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In the larger blogosphere of worldly proportions, Xanga blogs are anomalies.   Why? Because Xanga itself, and many of us, see our blogs as a *community*.   Which is natural, since, after all, one has to *belong to* Xanga to comment on a post. Yet in the larger blogosphere beyond Xanga, many independent non-communized blogs don’t even afford the possibility to comment. Yet still many do, but quite spontaneously and anonymously—without the need to *join a community*. Here we’re weird and semi-exclusive (semi- since anyone can *join*, weird because one *has to* join to interact).

Community is our strength!

Wiithout the structured membership of a community, the glue of eProps and the infallible linkage of comments are impossible. Without debating the merits of eProps, it is clear that their ranking function requires delineated membership in a terrarium of bloggers. And reliable links back to originators of comments require a membered community, too. If I leave a comment on your Xanga blog, you can at least unfailingly track me back to a genuine extant blog, a Xanga blog. In the larger world of independent bloggers, links to comments cannot be considered dependable since they are devised on-the-fly by the visitor and may be either accidentally or intentionally wrongly reported.

But Community is our backwater, too…

We limit interaction to *ourselves*, thus separating ourselves as a terrarium of bloggers apart from the larger, more open and natural blogosphere. The one *out there* composed of individual bloggers belonging to no pre-formed community but blogging from personal publishing software on their hard drives. The one that seems, or at least imagines itself, to be challenging the mass media as a communicative presence. The one that’s struggling, in the minds of many blog-watchers, to become an individualist art form. That blogosphere is the one that most informed sources have in mind when they ponder the *phenom of blogging*.   Yes, we are a part of this phenomenon, we are considerable, yet we do not match--due to our threaded collectivism--the Davy Crockett profile of the mainstream blogging pioneer.

Even John Hiler, the driving force of Xanga, doesn’t seem to be talking about Xanga when he talks about blogging. It’s as if Xanga is a side experiment or spinoff and not the revolution itself. For John, weblogs are an industry yet awaiting birth:

“When I think about the weblog space, the big question that comes to mind is that if personal publishing is an industry, how come nobody’s making any money? In order to answer that question, small businesses need to get involved in the personal publishing sector. I think that’s going to happen with weblogs becoming a more integral part of marketing. Weblogs are all about two people making a connection. Corporations, by their very nature, are an abstraction going away from the individual. Once weblogs start becoming a core tool in a small business marketing toolkit, then personal publishing becomes a real industry and it will support [editorial types].
“This is something the whole industry needs to get behind. There’s a difference between making a difference and making a profit. If it’s going to be an industry, weblogs need to become relevant to small businesses. And that’s one of the most exciting applications of weblogs to me,” said Hiler.

      --John Hiler , from interview with Deborah Branscum

And, of course, we also live or die by the online fate of Xanga, Inc.   While the Davy Crockett pioneering blogger out there is typically much more resilient—potentially living and dying only with the fate of the Internet itself.

Yet today we live! Let's celebrate to proclaim: *Today is a good day to die!*

   --Crazy Horse ( in my profile pic)