November 14, 2002

  • Is xanga getting senile? 

    It seems lately as I tour around xangaland that interactions are quite depressed, that is, props and comments are everywhere relatively scarce.  xanga’s seeming less like a ferocious, revolutionary forge for brazing blogs and more like a warming oven for keeping muffin posts slightly above room temperature.  What’s up with us? 


     


    Is xanga still birthing or stillbirthing?


     


    I’m beginning to believe that after an initial period of enhancing vigor when a blog comes to bloom, that there sets in a ‘half-live’ dynamic to continuing active blog production—let’s call it a ‘blog-life’ (no, not a 'dog's life'—I'll get down to that a little later below).  And that as the blog-life is expended, the disorder of entropy ensues: posts become irregular, and, in some cases, stop altogether, comments returned grow leaner in numbers, and what once seemed like notable popularity nudges onwards towards an extinguishing oblivion. 


     


    So how long is a ‘blog-life’ and when does it ‘kick-in’ ?  My impression is that most new blogs are fresh and blooming with enthusiasm and novelness for about 8 to 12 months on the average and then become subject to a ‘blog-life’ senility effect of a ‘halving’ reduction every subsequent six months or so. 


     


    Or is it more sociologically a situation where the absolute magnitudes of luminous posts reached a maximum limit with a smaller, friendlier-sized community (xanga, let's say a year or so ago) and that they are now actually decrementing amidst the more anonymous, indefinable environs of a garganutally-growing blogdom?  Such a situation would suggest kinship with the idyllic notion of moving into a small ‘friendly town' or small ‘friendly neighborhood' and discovering a big turnout for a ‘house-warming’ but, on a different hand, finding the process of effecting a change of address by relocating to a sprawling neighborhood of a large city a practically unheralded one anymore.


     


    Is there, possibly, something comparable to the Main Sequence evolution of stars that might explain the persistence and life of a blog in the blogosphere?  Stars can start out at different sizes {O-type (60 solar masses), G-type (1 solar mass—like the Sun), or M-type (0.1 solar masses)}, and they all start out burning hydrogen at their cores, but their cores eventually fill with helium ‘ash’.  Blogs can start-up with different popularity-appeal (based on content and quality and visibility) but they all tend to start with some enthusiasm, i.e., ‘fire in the belly’ at their core.   With helium filling the star’s core, core energy production ceases and the hydrogen fusion process progresses outwards into a shell around the core.  The core addiction to blogging is, in time, reduced and blog-production becomes a more peripheral activity.   Eventually due to equilibrium considerations, stars tend to turn into giants or super-giants of themselves and in so doing become brighter but cooler.  Blogs accumulate heaps of total comments (and eProps)—to a point—and though they’ve gained prominence in the community, they seem to begin to loose their ‘fire in the belly’.   Eventually, the giant stars may collapse into denser masses (white dwarfs or black dwarfs)—or the super-giants collapse and then explode dramatically into supernovas.  Blogs can fade toward an eventual contracted, puttering oblivion or self-destruct dramatically through post-deletion.


     


    *looks up at the last paragraph*   Well, the analogy isn’t precise, but it’s a start at understanding blogosphere dynamics.


     


    And the xanga MeetUps—what happened with them?  Not even john or monsur or marc or dan (all xanga official-types) had even one single thing to say about the largest one—the NYC MeetUp which some of them were promising to attend.  The Cleveland gig here for me was cancelled for lack of interest.  Did they all turn into embarrassing busts, too disjointed to bring to blogmention?


     


    Maybe the problem is that the MeetUps didn’t GetDown?!


     


    So next month I’m sponsoring a xanga GetDown: you show up and we’ll get-down.  And if we really get-down, like diamond dogs, I might even turn my blog’s mobile damncam on (on the left over there, but not satellite-mobile right now)  for all the blogosphere in realtime to behold.  So that’s my new take on blogging: GetDown (carbon fusion) and get bold.  Then cry havoc and let loose the dogs of blogs.

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