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One thing I learned at Technorati is that one sure-fire way to get linked to by bloggers is to write an article about blogging. Sure enough, The Economist and Nick Carr have, with their 'death of the blogosphere' articles, garnered a fair bit of linkage.

Their curious obsession with the Technorati Top 100 is missing what is really happening. As JP points out, the old blogging crew are still around, they're just blogging less that those paid to do so a dozen times a day. Not because they are less interested or engaged, but because there are now many new ways to do what we used blogs for back then.

In 2001, if we wanted to share brief thoughts, we used a blog; to link to others’ posts, we used a blog. If we wanted a group discussion, we made a group blog.

With Technorati, and trackback and pingback, we built tools to follow cross-blog conversations, and learned that we are each others’ media. As I wrote in 2004:

The great thing about weblogs is when you discover someone. Someone who makes sense to you, or someone who surprises you with a viewpoint you hadn't thought of. Once you have found them you can subscribe to their feeds and see how they can keep inspiring or surprising you.
You can even start a blog, link to them, and join the conversation

A year later I reiterated:

By tracking people linking to me or mentioning my name, Technorati helps me in this distributed asynchronous conversation (thats how I found Mike and Dave's comments, after all). However, as I've said before, "I can read your thoughts, as long as you write them down first". In order to be in the conversation, you need to be writing and linking. Perforce, this means that those who write and link more, and are written about and linked to more, are those who most see the utility of it.

What has happened since is that the practices of blogging have become reified into mainstream usage. Through social networks and Twitter and Reader shared items and Flickr and HuffDuffer and all the other nicely-focused gesture spreading tools we have, the practice of blogging, of mediating the world for each other, has become part of the fabric of the net.
This may be the first blogpost I've written since August, but the many digital publics I'm part of have been flowing media and friendly gestures to and from me all the time.

Elizabeth Churchill and Ben Gross looked into this and found out that people find it easier to remember passwords than usernames, because they use the same passwords everywhere, and they end up with multiple different email accounts to handle the problem of having handed them to to all these sites and getting spammed by them.

Meanwhile, over here in the blog world, we've been using blog URLs to refer to people for years, and social network sites have proliferated URLs that are people. I have several that refer to me, my events, my music, my twitters and my photographs linked from the sidebar here. We even have XFN's rel="me" to connect them together, and OpenID to allow them to be used as logins elsewhere, instead of emails.

The underlying thing that is wrong with an email address is that it's affordance is backwards - it enables people who have it to send things to you, but there's no reliable way to know that a message is from you. Conversely, URLs have the opposite default affordance- people can go look at them and see what you have said about yourself, and computers can go and visit them and discover other ways to interact with what you have published, or ask you permission for more.

So, developers, remember that URLs are people too.

Update: This tension between email-as-identifier and email-as-way-to-be-spammed is what makes Scoble's attempt to extract 5,000 people's emails from Facebook for his own use less defensible than it appears at first. Dare Obasanjo recognises the tensions, but strangely dismisses the OpenSocial attempt to abstract out this kind of data into a common API.

As of today, my feed readership is between 550 and 600. My Technorati authority is 117, my rank is 54,800ish. All things considered, my blogs are small, very much personal.

Yet, do the math. 100 MILLION blogs, and mine is the 50,000th largest in the world?

Or do your own test. create an empty blog, register it with technorati, post a couple of test messages, and do nothing else. Don't advertise it, don't point to it, don't create content. you'll likely find that Technorati will throw it somewhere around 1mm in authority.

He goes on to challenge Technorati's count of 100 million blogs because of this. What is really going on? Well, links to blogs follow a Long Tail distribution. You can debate whether it's a power law or an exponential, but it isn't a gaussian. Here's a 2005 links vs rank log chart, and here's a 2006 one (if Technorati want to run my old script that generates these we could have a 2007 one). Technorati's 'Authority' is the number of inbound links in the last 180 days. So, as Chuq notes, if you have a new blog with no links to it, it is ranked about 4 millionth, tied with every other blog with no inbound links. So yes, everyone is above average - they're all on the 96th percentile.

But what happens when you start getting links? I have a couple of old blogs that have a few. With 2 links, my rank goes up to 2.6 Millionth; with 3 to 1.9 millionth, with 5 to 1.2 millionth, up to this blog with 141 inbound links ranked at 44,734. This is a very easy hill to climb in percentage terms, though clearly getting into the top 100 is still relatively hard.

So what of Chuq's contention that the other 96 million blogs with no links are "abandoned, stillborn, or some kind of spam blog" ? A lot of blogs are made for specific events, and don't need further posts adding (and so may not have been linked to in the last 180 days), and a lot have a low posting rate, sure. But, as Dave Winer once said, by that measure every book and magazine article is abandoned. Not all blogs are interested in links - many are personal journals or for a small group of friends to read, and achieving those goals well.

So Chuq's accusations of "playing fast and loose wiht the numbers" are really his misunderstandings of Long Tail distributions. In the Blogosphere, like Lake Woebegon, everyone really is above average.

I've realised why I got quote so cross with Andrew Keen and the way he portrays the net as 'corrupting'. Pagan Kennedy's essay on MySpace reminded me, and Tom's passionate defence of his blog against PR slummers who want to use him as a mouthpiece confirmed this thought. There is a temptation online, and that is to go slumming - to pretend that you can abuse people's trust and emotions without fear of personal consequences, that people online are somehow not real and so you can toy with them and remain above it. A while back at Making Light, Lucy Kemnitzer explained this well:

Slumming isn't going to a seedy place. Slumming is taking your superior attitude and your certainty that the world is your Disneyland in with you. It's looking at the people who work there as performing monkeys putting on a show for you. It's being cushioned by your privilege. It's thinking that if the place is raided, surely you will be passed over because you're not one of those people. It's running a narration in your head where you are the normal observer, and those guys are the freaks.

You can do it almost everywhere. I've seen people do it on an ordinary residential street in a city, going into a corner restaurant or working man's bar as if it were the Exotic And Dangerous Gangsta Exhibit at a Los Vegas theme hotel. I've seen people do it at a flea market in an ordinary rural town. Or at the weekly get-together of a community, where they danced and sang and gave each other presents (a pow-wow). I saw people doing it at my college, thanks to a former Governor and President calling it a cross between a hippie pad and a bordello.

Here's a clue about how not to go slumming when you enter a place: shed your privilege and your pretensions to superiority. If they play music that isn't to your taste, maybe it's because they hear something in it that you don't, so listen. If they're presenting an image you find disturbing, maybe you're not looking at it right. If you can't get out of your own skull while you're there, maybe you belong somewhere else.

When Keen (p76) cites Michael Hiltzik and Lee Siegel (both journalists who got caught in sock-puppetry online - posting hagiographic comments about themselves through pseudonyms), it is not their perfidy he condemns, but the Internet as enabler. In fact, it is their slumming and condescension that is the problem - their longing for freedom from consequences of their actions that led them astray. Keen himself is a knowing troll, trying to be the Simon Cowell of Web 2.0, and behaving like a pantomime villain to get web conferences to boo him. The ultimate example of this kind of slumming was Michael Skube's polemic against blogs, profoundly rebutted by Jay Rosen. Pagan Kennedy's tone is dancing around the edges of slumming - she starts out with "OMG drunk teenagers", but the article comes to realise that people online are human too, and makes fun of her own original attitudes.

The girls in question would not have been slumming if they had been going to drink the drinks, chat to the patrons, or see the dancers. They weren't. They were going to watch themselves drink the drinks, chat to the patrons, and see the dancers. It's like Kundera's definition of kitsch - the last layer of self-observation determines the definition.