Amen to that. Good luck with whatever you come up with.

Influence is a whole other question, and it’s capable of being defined (and perhaps measured) in a number of different ways, but I’ve kept the notes I made for what I had to say on the question so I will try to do a post on it over the next couple of days.

I promised myself (and the girl) that I’d stop traditional written blogging after the election, but I’m interested in micro blogging and mobile platforms, short text via mobile IM, SMS or mobile web with voice thrown in and some video. Anything that takes you away from the desk and can be created and consumed away from the desk.

When the election is over I’m gonna throw some time into that and see where it takes me. Maybe an LP podcast?

Yeah, I see you, Flip. A passing breed, amigo. I really miss balls-to-the-page ‘traditional bloggers’ like Dave Heidelberg, eh. I even find myself missing the ‘traditional Blairelzebub’ of pre-Op Ed gig yore - which shows how nuts I really am. (Oy, oy, Evil One! Got bit by the Famous Byline greebly, did we. You big cuddly softie…it used to be all about the music, man…) I’ll miss your posts, Phil, if what you say is true. To whence, pray tell, are you off to? Or just had enough? Before you nip off, one thing I meant to ask you long ago (actually, it’d be interesting to hear from all the LP regulars on this score): have you done much banging freelance pitches against the MSM wall over your years of blogging?

By the by, I’ve just finished reading Margaret Simons’s cracker of a book: The content makers. Boy, talk about writing ‘as if [she] has no ‘paying demographic’ to please, nothing to lose, no influence…” It’s suck-in-your breath, holler with joy, marvel at her elan stuff. Breathtaking. And - I reckon - highly influential in the long run. Like Latham’s bracing hacks at the Meeja, only with class and wit and narrative elegance and cohesion. And the fact that she got it up in the Oz MSM - my god, the sheer energy required to get any book up here, let alone one about politics/media - proves that ‘platform’ is irrelevant. Great writing always transcends what were thought to be hitherto stylistic imperatives.

Good luck where-ever you go, Phil. Hope you keep writing.

But I look at what’s happening in the social sites like Facebook and see connectivity and interactions that through their critical mass still add up to something influential as far as social commentary is concerned.

From Jack.

If there is any noticeable ‘trend in blogging’ worth addressing it’s the way the joint is becoming so tame and lame as the ‘pro’ bloggers shift into town and the bigger amateur blogs win an audience and MSM cross-over. I think the more interesting debate to be had here is a general one: about the way ’success’ tends to breed caution in any writer’s writing, and caution in writing is what really leads to diminishing influence.

Yep, you can feel it all right, the criticism comes thick and fast and that would cause a lot of writers to level out their writing. Personally I write what the fuck I please Jack, and I don’t really care about writing perfect pieces.

But what do I know, I’m just a soon to be ex-blogger.

Comparing the influence of MSM blogs (minimal) and traditional blogs (less minimal) best gets to the heart of the ‘great blog revolution’, or more pertinently, lack there-of. MSM blogs are usually as anodyne, dull, fence-sitting and impervious to genuine ‘unscripted’ conversation as MSM print writing. That should tell us that the real ‘influence’ debate to be had is not about ‘bloggers v. msm-ers’; it’s about professional v. amateur writers. Professional writers write ’safe’: to a template of some kind, within self-censored limitations, and stripped by the editorial process of much of the kind of raw energy of human passion that is the only vehicle capable of ’selling’ ideas and information that challenge the status quo. No contrived, professional ‘writing persona’ can influence the world in that way, not lastingly. You’ve got to be the authorial real deal to convince someone to change their worldview. It’s not influence if you merely tell someone what they already know. And that’s what ‘professional’ writing mostly does, perhaps necessarily; write to avoid alienating its paying demographic. The writers professional publishers use needs must write as if they have something to lose - because they do: commercial viability. So it’s very largely condom writing, simulcrum writing, pantomime writing, ‘inverted comma’ writing…with notable - and more’s the point, usually short-lived - exceptions, professional non-fiction is essentially ‘play-acting’ writing.

Yet what gave and still occasionally gives any writer their influence is just the opposite: a willingness to write as if they have no ‘paying demographic’ to please, nothing to lose, no influence. Where they write that way - blog, msm, cave wall - is, as usual, supremely irrelevant, except to the merely pragmatic extent that the blog self-publishing platform makes such ‘bareback’ writing easier to get to a big audience than any time in history. Or so it should. If there is any noticeable ‘trend in blogging’ worth addressing it’s the way the joint is becoming so tame and lame as the ‘pro’ bloggers shift into town and the bigger amateur blogs win an audience and MSM cross-over. I think the more interesting debate to be had here is a general one: about the way ’success’ tends to breed caution in any writer’s writing, and caution in writing is what really leads to diminishing influence.

I wish bloggers would stop seeing words in cyberspace in different qualitative terms to words published anywhere else. It sets up false dichotomies that lead to online writers believing themselves automatically immune from common writerly pitfalls. The medium is not ‘cyberspace’ or ‘paper’ - they are mere publishing mechanisms. The medium proper - common to all written words - is…well, ‘written words’. That’s what in the writerly case conveys the ideas, emotions and information of ‘communication between sentient beings’. Other media for attempting that splendid, indeed definitive, human task are ‘visual images’, ‘music’, ‘mime’ (ie body language), ‘maths’ and so on. What most seem to think are ‘communications media’ are actually just ‘platforms for communications media’, as Phil’s title suggests (and his thread-text then inexplicably contradicts!?) So IMHO the question here should really be: ‘Is the written word declining in influence?’. The answer is yes, and to answer the obvious follow-up ‘why?’ is by far a more urgent epistemological project of the Information Age than this latest version of the historical demarcation dirt-pissing b/w publishers as mere platform-technology changes: scroll-makers and stonemasons, stone-masons and ink-scribes, scribes and typesetters, typesetters and IT geeks, whatever. Mere technical lacky-chatter, beneath us mighty wordsmiths. (There’s geenyus afoot tonight, Gates - fetch me something to write on, boy geek! ) After ten years of mostly failing to get my deathless words into MSM print and five ranty years online in various fora and capacities I have my views on the ‘Why?’ of the declining influence of writing, and they almost all start and end with the quality of professional writers, not their writing…but that’s my hobby horse whinnying restlessly again, so I’ll shut up.

I wonder if the next step for many Australian bloggers is towards longer pieces which are less hyperlinked and transferable to print.

I’d have thought that the next step could be more the style of Metafilter.com with shorter posts having more hyperlinks.

Swiftblogging I am sure remains potent for them.

Over here, blogging got a huge push before the last election, and the conversation is different now.

For a while, blogging was a great way for secret writers to go public, but a lot of that effect has washed through the system, for the usual reasons to do with pent up demand.

And now the MSM is littered with blogs and comments, which is surely carved into the general internet conversation.

I wonder if the next step for many Australian bloggers is towards longer pieces which are less hyperlinked and transferable to print.

With the Howard and Bush junta now clearly on the nose, Blair makes a hasty retreat, by downplaying his influence. What a tool.

Tim Blair would not know if his arse was on fire,and I,m buggered if I would go out of my way to tell him.

Actually he’d catch on pretty quickly when his shirt collar caught fire.

Tim Blair would not know if his arse was on fire,and I,m buggered if I would go out of my way to tell him.

Poor Tim, always the LP whipping boy.

It’s always difficult to tell whether he’s as thick as he claims, or stupid like a fox.

It’s probably the latter. A few years ago blog triumphalism was politically useful, so he was all for it; at the moment it suits him politically to play down the influence of blogs, so he does.

It’s foolish to expect him to be consistent.

Ew no. I want my online persona to be the same as my hard copy persona: all over the place, dfferent things to different people at different times and never the twains shall meet.

I also wonder if the proliferation of social networking sites means that people with interesting voices are neutralising themselves by spreading themselves too thinly across too many hubbub-ridden platforms.

Yep. Not to mention closing themselves off from conversations on the wider web.

leaving behind nothing but a massive chunk of marketable personal information.

Yep. That’s why I’m generally not a fan of closed networks like Facebook, there has to be a way of claiming ownership of your content and taking that with you wherever you go or having your online persona all integrated into one place.

The example of influence I gave is the the kind that I think positive, it comes from a genuine need by folks to change things in the bar scene in Sydney and was not activated by Clover. Of course this one small action if successful may have the effect of lessining the power of the pubs, clubs and pokies lobby and give our pollies some courage, and for NSW that would be a food thing.

I see much of this as giving some power back to ourselves, in much the same way Burmese activists are using the web and blogging to effect change.