Samizdata

Blogging will not turn bad writers into good ones, but it can make life a whole lot better for good writers.

The fear among them (us? – I vomit the verbals, you judge) is that if you just fling your stuff up as it gets done so that it can immediately be read by all those greedy readers forthwith and at no cost, you will, at best, become a world-famous pauper, a super-celebrity beggar, famous on six continents for not having two cents to rub together. Buddy can you spare a Paypal payment? Well, at least blogging gives the downtrodden a voice.

Oh, you do occasionally get paying gigs out of all that unpaid stuff you churn out. But think tanks are one thing, and actual paying readers are something else again.

This is why I find the news that Scrappleface has just had a book published so very interesting, from the point of view of blogging in general, if not of this particular blogger.

I caught myself thinking yesterday that although I could blog about this book, I could not actually review it because I have not yet read it. But actually I have, I assume, read quite a lot of it, as soon as it came out. It is, I am entirely confident, very good and very funny. If you enjoy poking fun at Democrats etc. as much as he does, you should buy it. You will love it.

Seriously, we bloggers must all hope that this book sells really well.

At present, most regular publishers probably regard blogging as just one great big given-away cowpat on their lush and expensively priced pastures. But if the idea gets into their heads that they can grow a whole new crop of expensive books in this ordure, well, this could really bring the old media and the new back into bed with each other.

Think about it from a publisher’s point of view. What do publishers do? What they do is edit stuff that they have finally got into their hands. So, let the mainstream, big name editors surf the blogs and find their writers there. They can feel happy and powerful choosing material that has – blessing upon blessings – already been written and is already on their desks. No begging phone calls, and ordeal by deadlines. (Deadlines are hell for writers, but imagine what they are like for hard-pressed publishers.) The entire job is already on their desks and in their hands.

As for readers, well, writing as a reader, I do not notice any decline in my enthusiasm for books, or in anyone else’s. Books are nice. You can read them in the lavatory, and in coffee bars and trains and bank and supermarket queues. You can give them as Christmas presents to human beings, or to members of your family.

As blogs multiply in number, the need for people to spot the best ones and pick out their best bits is bound to grow. Bloggers have shown a great enthusiasm for picking out their favourite bits by everybody else, today. But not many have shown themselves willing to plough through their favourite blogs and tell the rest of us which are their favourite bits from a year ago, two years ago, and (for let us look ahead) ten years ago. (Personally I cannot be bothered to pick out my own favourite bits by me.) Publishers have just the people to do this, and just the product (books) in which to display the fruits of such labours.

Bloggers. The new book writers. We can all hope.

Some members of the journalist profession need to be explained things slowly and clearly. Scott Burgess undertakes that ungrateful task and tries to get the message through to Polly Toynbee.

… Welcome to the new media world, Polly.

Up until now, an information elite has been able to misrepresent and manufacture fact with virtual impunity – sometimes accidentally, sometimes as a deliberate means of pushing a chosen agenda.

For example, if a newspaper polemicist wanted to contend that “Scandinavian countries are best of all” at overcoming obesity, it was unlikely that many would notice and connect the fact that: “Norway has the highest percentage of overweight men in Europe, according to a new report by the World Health Organization (WHO).”

Those who did notice such “anomalies” had no easy means of communicating them to others interested in issues of journalistic integrity.

As you see, that’s changing now. What you (and many others) are in the process of learning is that, from now on, reportorial sloppiness and dishonesty will be noted, exposed, and punished – quickly and very, very publicly.

Journalists who are accurate and honest have little to fear – the facts will out. Their less capable (and less truthful) colleagues risk the humiliation of public ridicule.

Best of all, in this new media environment the once-wise maxim “never get in an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel” no longer applies – we all have barrels now. Ardent proponents of equality would no doubt applaud this development, were they not the ones whose superior status was now under threat.

Very Truly Yours,

Scott Burgess
The Daily Ablution
London

For more quality time with bloggers and Polly, follow the path that lead to the above document.

I am intrigued by one of those little one-line links that Instapundit did yesterday, this time to a row between a Canadian politician and some Canadian bloggers.

This was only a matter of time. Bloggers in Canada are deleting posts after Warren Kinsella, an aide to former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, threatened them with legal action.

By the sound of it, there is very little that the blogosphere can do to make this Warren Kinsella person think better of his threats, although I would love to be proved wrong about that. Even by the standards of regular party politicians, he sounds like a fairly unpleasant character. All bloggers can do is publicise that he has made the threats, which I think he will be very happy about. He may be nasty but he is not stupid. He wants to be known as a political bully, if only to sell his book about how to be a political bully. Postings like Instapundit’s, and Cicada’s, and mine, are probably the exact thing he wanted to get from his legal round robin.

What this ruckus does show is how important the Internet in general, and the Blogosphere in particular, are becoming in generating publicity. Kinsella, as the author of a book called Web of Hate, does not make the mistake of calling the Internet insignificant while simultaneously raging against it. But to all those who still say that the Internet in general and the Blogosphere in particular do not count for anything, this row will be one more item of evidence under the general heading of ‘You Wish’. I mean, if politicians do not rate bloggers, why do they threaten to sue bloggers when bloggers say things they do not like?

In the age of the Internet, suing people is starting to emerge as a whole new way of communicating a message, to a lot of people, very economically, a point also made by Tyler Cowen at the Social Affairs Unit blog, in a posting about how Big Music is suing lots of downloaders. That, Cowen says, is what Big Music is trying to do also.

For those of you interested in business oriented blogging, I have written an article called Business Hippos and Blogging Birds over at the Big Blog Company. I have always seen business blogs as the best manifestation of the whole Cluetrain vibe.