“Uit die vertaaloefeningen heb ik lering getrokken: dat een leeservaring begint met het overwinnen van irritatie.” p. 16

“Literaire ervaring kwam niet alleen tot stand door het inzetten van je verbeeldingswereld, je fantasie, je dagdromen, maar ook door het lichaam, door het voelen van je ademhalingsritme, als je een tekst hardop las; of tactiel, door de schaatsbewegingen van je hand als je een tekst overschreef.” p. 16

“Eigenlijk zijn de schrijvers van mijn voorkeur allemaal vertalers. Hun boeken behoren tot de categorie die Calvino nog niet heeft genoemd: de boeken die je leest omdat je ze zou willen vertalen, om ze te begrijpen in wat je niet begrijpt van je eigen taal.” p. 75

Uit: Anthony Mertens, Lezen, man! Essays en kritieken, De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 2006.

“According to Fielding the whole world of letters was becoming a ‘democracy, or rather a downright anarchy’; and there was no one to enforce the old laws, since, as he wrote in the Covent Garden Journal (1752, no. 23,1), even the ‘offices of criticism’ had been taken over by ‘a large body of irregulars’ who had been admitted ‘into the realm of criticism without knowing one word of the ancient laws’.”

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957) p. 58.

“…this unsettled way of reading … which naturally seduces us into as undetermined a manner of thinking. … That assemblage of words which is called a style becomes utterly annihilated. … the common defence of these people is , that they have no design in reading but for pleasure, which I think should rather arise from reflection and remembrance of what one had read, than from the transient satisfaction of what one does, and we should be pleased proportionately as we are profited.”

Richard Steele, in the Guardian, 1713, quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957). p. 48.

“We were yesterday three kiple chined, by the grease of God, in the holy bands of mattermoney.”

“As for madam Lashmiheygo, you nose her picklearities.”

No, this is not from FW, this is Smollett The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Penguin Classics, p. 394-5.

I’ve been searching for this quote forever. Browsing through old syllabi I find it, somewhere in the text ‘Art as language’ by Yury Lotman – very heavily underlined annotated by myself, but not this sentence:

Art is the most economical, compact method for storing and transmitting information. But art also has other properties wholly worthy of the attention of cyberneticians and perhaps, in time, of design engineers.

[I guess, with design engineers Lotman refers to what we now know as 'programmers'].

My annotation – dating from around 1988 – “ONZIN” (=nonsense).

Yury Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, Ann Arbor, 1977, (1970), p. 23

Below are the quotes that I used in the 15 minutes-sketch of my dream of radio [2.0], yesterday at the Balie, at the Coolmediahottalk-show: http://www.coolmediahottalk.net/. I spoke about a few things more, but I guess/hope these ‘quotes’ conjure up my dream somehow.

Btw: it was a really nice event, not a large crowd, but a very good crowd, with an extensive knowledge of, well, alternative radio. Adam Hyde presented before me – talking about his idea of radio and his radio projects. Thanks to him and thanks to the issues and ideas raised by the public (a.o. Josephine Bosma, Federico Bonelli, Jaromil, Jo van der Spek, Eric Kluitenberg, Radio Patapoe and a radiomaker from Rotterdam) the night managed to give an overview of what makes ‘us’ dream about radio, do radio, why radio is still relevant, how radio is transforming and transforms (technically and culturally), why radio can be so exciting.

My talk was personal – but in the answering of questions and the discussion there was a chance to also adress political/cultural issues.

My quotes:

“Whyfor had they (…) donated him, (…) their tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modern as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute, (…) equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for distance getting and connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini-Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker, capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emittences, key clickings, vaticum cleaners, due to woman formed mobile or man made static and bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes.”

“This harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole) they caused to be worked from a magazine battery (called the Mimmim Bimbim patent number 1132, Thorpetersen and Synds, Jomsborg, Selverbergen) which was tuned up by twintriodic singulvalvulous pipelines (lackslipping along as if their liffing deepunded on it) with a howdrocephalous enlargement, a gain control of circumcentric megacycles, ranging from the antidulibnium onto the serostaatarean.”

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939, 309.11-310.21

John Cage, Imaginary Landscape #4, (for 12 radio’s, 24 performers & 1 conductor), 1951

“wat was dat alweer, een radio, een nieuw wonder van de wetenschappelijke god - en zij vertelden haar, dat het eigenlijk aethergolven waren, een kunstmatig oor dat de wereld kon beluisteren (en ge moest de kleine louis boone zien, hoe hij de knop omdraaide, en wachtte tot de stroom was doorgekomen … hier radio brussel, ici radio paris, norddeutscher rundfunk … en gelijk hij dat alles opschreef, voelde hij zich gewichtig, maar liet het zich niet blijken: hij was een snotneuske, hij dacht dat de wereld nu aan zijn gat hing”

Louis Paul Boon, Zomer te Ter-Muren, ed. 1966, p. 320

“By tuning a radio, you control the amount of wind in your house and, to a lesser degree, the language spoken there. You dial in the wind and regulate which rooms it will enter; how hard it will blow, and the form it will take: shouting, singing, silence, breath, whispering, aroma.”

“Different radio stations collect different kinds of wind, then break it up and slow it down until it sounds like a song or a man talking.”

Ben Marcus, “The Least You Need to Know About Radio”, in Parkett 61, 2001, p.162.

John Cage, Roaratorio, 1979 [____,____ ____ circus on ____]

“The mixture is not a specialized genre dished up for a small group of fans. It is an expedition to the innermost recesses of radio. The penchant for mixing represents the transition from alternative media, which still try to fill a lacuna in the existing supply, to sovereign media, which have detached themselves from the potential listening audience. They do not see themselves as part of bourgeois (anti-)openness or the smorgasbord of media choices, which at most they observe from outside. Things broadcast by others are merely potential ingredients. News is one archive among many. Sovereign media are fallout from the “emancipation of the media”, and abandon the communication model.”

Geert Lovink, “The Theory of Mixing”, Mediamatic, 6#4, summer 1992.

“Vanaf de dag dat ik ging lezen en studeren, naar de training en de loopschool op de atletiekclub ging en uitprobeerde wat ik had gehoord en gelezen, werd hardlopen een kunst. Een kunst in de oude zin van het woord, namelijk als praktijk om te leren, te ontdekken, om vermaak en ontroering te bewerkstelligen. Belangrijk aan het woord ‘praktijk’ is dat het aandeel van zintuigen, emoties, kennis, sociale ervaring, verwondering en handelen gelijkwaardig is.”

Dirk van Weelden, Tempo, Augustus, Amsterdam, 2007, p. 73-74.

Looptijd was de ultieme roman over hardlopen (vergelijkbaar met wat De Renner voor het wielrennen deed). Tempo is voorbeeldige filosofie. Eigenlijk zou dit boekje in de boekhandel op de filosofieplank moeten staan (maar juist dan zul je misleid worden en het verslijten voor een modieuze gril van een uitgeefconcern), je moet het zoeken in de sporthoek.

Waarom voorbeeldig? Omdat het boekje geen moment over iets anders gaat dan over hardlopen. Omdat het in heldere zinnen beschrijft wat hardlopen is – in alle dimensies, en hoe het fysiologische, het-goede-gevoel-oproepen, de cultuur, en de geschiedenis niet te scheiden zijn in de beleving van het hardlopen. Geen moment neemt Van Weelden hardlopen als metafoor voor iets anders. Het is nooit meer dan gewoon hardlopen, een stukje rennen – maar dat stukje rennen heeft wel gevolgen, het vormt. Van Weeldens uitleg van het genieten van het hardlopen, raakt aan wat het leven is, en wat het leven de moeite waard maakt om te leven, aan het geheim van een goed humeur.

Kijk, nu maak ik er bijna pseudo-filosofie van. Van Weelden schrijft ‘gewoon’ (… en dat is niet zo makkelijk) over verschillende theorieën van het lopen (de elastische methode en de beheerste val), over Prefontaine en Zatopek, over hoe hijzelf is begonnen met lopen. Er zijn ook nog twee mooie stijloefeningen, en wat korte stukjes die waarschijnlijk ook voor een gelegendheid geschreven zijn. Er spreekt een tomeloos enthousiasme uit.

Het zijn allemaal bouwsteentjes in zijn ‘oeuvre’ dat gaat over enthousiasme en de tegenwoordigheid van geest. Het is een filosofie waarvan ik ‘goeie zin’ krijg. Het is heel precieze filosofie – uit elke zin spreekt liefde voor het weten, voor het onderzoeken, het willen weten, liefde, voor mijn part, voor het opdoen van wijsheid.

Tempo is onvergelijkbaar met twee andere ‘filosofische’ boekjes over sport die ik vorig jaar las. Waarschijnlijk was het bestaan van beide boeken aan mij voorbijgegaan, ware het niet dat ze verschenen op de plank ‘wielrennen’ in de openbare bibliotheek. Het gaat om Peter Sminks De cultus van het lijden, een oefening in duursport, en Wielrennen van de Belgische filosoof Marc van den Bossche. Beide leuk om te lezen, vol herkenbare gedachten, ideeën en anekdotes – althans voor deze lezer die zelf fietst. Maar het boek van Smink (die, zo leid ik af uit z’n boek bij De Trappist fietste) gaat veel minder over fietsen en wielrennen dan over zijn eigen ontwikkeling en zijn nogal moeizame receptie van Walter Benjamin. En al lezende betrapte ik me op de gedachte dat ik daar niet op zat te wachten. Liever lees ik dan een goed essay over Benjamin, zonder de fietsanekdotes. Liever lees ik het een verslag van een fietstocht, zonder persoonlijke, theoretische uitweidingen. Omdat Benjamin en duursport alleen samenkomen in de persoon Smink wordt het noch een goed boek over duursport, noch een goed essay over Benjamin. ‘Vlees noch vis’, ‘het komt niet uit de verf’, denk je dan. Jammer, want Smink kan best schrijven. Over het boek van Marc van den Bossche was ik ook niet heel enthousiast. Het zegt een filosofie van het wielrennen te zijn, en dat is zo’n beetje nummer één in mijn lijst ‘favoriete onderwerpen’. (Dan wordt het lastig om de verwachting in te lossen…) Maar Van den Bossche heeft geen filosofie van het wielrennen geschreven, hij projecteert filosofie op het wielrennen. Precies het omgekeerde van de methode van Dirk van Weelden. Van den Bossche is een academisch filosoof die nu eens een boek geschreven heeft over zijn hobby. Natuurlijk ook hier herkenbaarheid, bekende anekdotes, en dan doorspekt met wat ik maar “Plato, Kant en Hegel” noem. Ik kreeg sterk de indruk dat wat Van de Bossche wil meedelen over wielrennen, duursport en zijn eigen verhouding daarmee, zonder die “professionele academische filosofie” kan. Maar het is nou eenmaal zijn vak. Andersom vermoed ik dat zijn filosofische punten ook gemaakt kunnen worden zonder het wielrenverhaal. Ook hier is het de persoon die beide aspecten samenbindt, maar dat niet ontstijgt. Het levert geen nieuwe filosofische inzichten op, en geen nieuwe inzichten in het wielrennen… Natuurlijk ben ik jaloers op Van den Bossche – kon ik maar een filosofie van het wielrennen schrijven! En natuurlijk is het best een goed boek, waarover ik eigenlijk een leuk stukje zou moeten schrijven. (Wie van wielrennen en lezen houdt, die leze dit boek!) Mijn matige enthousiasme komt vooral voort uit een vergelijking met Van Weelden. (En een vergelijking met Benjo Maso’s onovertroffen werk). En goed beschouwd zijn al die andere boeken over wielrennen die ik verslind, veel minder – de biogafieën en plaatjesboeken – maar dat betreft een andere categorie, een ander genre met een ander verwachtingspatroon.

Ik noem de boeken van Smink en Van den Bossche om duidelijk te maken waarom ik Van Weeldens aanpak voorbeelding vind. Van Weelden onderzoekt, ontdekt, staat open voor het nieuwe, beschrijft zijn onderwerp zo goed mogelijk. Hij projecteert geen filosofie op het hardlopen, en schrijft evenmin over het hardlopen als metafoor voor een persoonlijk zoektocht. Natuurlijk ook hier komt het samen in de persoon Van Weelden, maar door zijn observerende, onderzoekende en ontdekkende houding overstijgt hij ook altijd het persoonlijke perspectief. Hij schrijft “gewoon” over alle dimensies van het hardlopen. Zo bedrijf je filosofie.

Postscript
Ik ben te negatief over Smink – want ondertussen bevat zijn boek ook het definitieve essay over De Renner, een essay dat geschreven moest worden.

“Political space has its neutral ground. But does Time? is there such thing as the neutral hour? one that goes neither forward nor back? is that too much to hope?” (ATD, p. 577)

“But the mechanics understood each other. At the end of the summer, it would be these hardheaded tinkers with their lopsided-healed fractures, scars, and singed-off eyebrows, chronically short-tempered before Creation’s irreducible cussedness, who’d come out of these time-traveler’s clambakes with any practical kind of momentum, and when the professors had all gone back to their bookshelves and protégés and intriguings after this or that Latinate token of prestige, it’d be the engineers who’d figure out how to keep in touch, what telegraphers and motor expressmen to trust, not to mention sheriffs who wouldn’t ask too many questions, Italian firework artists who’d come in and cover for them when the townsfolk grew suspicious of night horizons, where to find the discontinued part, the exotic ore, the local utility somewhere on Earth able to generate them current with the exact phase or frequency or sometimes simple purity that would meet their increasingly inscrutable needs.” (ATD, p. 457/8)

[Roswell & Merle in front of a blackboard full of mathematical equations]

“Way I figure, all’s we need to do’s translate this here into hardware, then solder it all up, and we’re in business.”
“Or in trouble”
“By the way, who’s the practical one here and who’s the crazy dreamer, again? I keep forgetting.” (ATD 459)

“So”, the professor has gone on to explain, “if one acccepts the idea that maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again, we may say that these paramorphoscopes of Icelandic spar, which cannot exist in great numbers if at all, reveal the architecture of dream, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude.” (ATD p. 250).

“Wernfer, damn him, keen-witted but unheimlich, is obsessed with railway lines, history emerges from geography of course, but for him the primary geography of the planet is the rails, obeying their own necessity, interconnections, places chosen and bypassed, centers and radiations therefrom, grades possible and impossible, how linked by canals, crossed by tunnels and bridges either in place or someday to be, capital made material – and flows of power as well, expressed for example in massive troop movements, now and in futurity – he styles himself the prophet of Eisenbahntüchtigkei, or railworthiness, each and every accomodation to the matrix of meaningful points, each taken as a coefficient in the planet’s unwritten equation…” (ATD p. 242)

For more on this see for instance Matterarts The Invention of Communication…

“As if innocence were some sort of humorous disease , transmitted, in a stage farce, from one character to another, Lew soon found himself wondering if he had it, and if so who he’d caught it from. Not to mention how sick exactly it might be making him. The other way to ask the question being, who in this was playing him for a fish, and how deep was their game? If it was the T.W.I.T. itself using him for motives even more “occult” the they’d pretended to let him in on, then this was serious manure pile, and he’d best find a way out of it, soon as he could.” (ATD p. 223)

Hmmm, remember Slothrop, paranoia & anti-paranoia in GR…?

“Suppose it were happen to us, in the civilized world. If ‘another form of life’ decided to use humans for similar purposes, and being out on a mission of comparable desperation, as its own resources dwindled, we human beasts would likewise simply be slaughtered one by one, and those still alive obliged to, in some sense, eat their flesh.”
(…)
“Sir, that is disgusting.”
“Not literally then … but we do use another, often mortally, with the same disablement of feeling, of conscience … each of us knowing that at some point it will be our own turn. Nowhere to run but into a hostile and lifeless waste.”
“You refer to present world conditions under capitalism and the Trusts.”
“There appears to be little difference. How else could we have come to it?”
“Evolution. Ape evolves to man, well, what’s the next step — human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood — a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or powerful he is.”

“Another Quest for another damned Magic Crystal. Horsefeathers, I say. Wish I’d known before I signed on. Say, you aren’t one of these sentient Rocksters, are you?”

Mineral consciousness figured even back in that day as a source of jocularity – had they known what was waiting in that category … waiting to move against them, grins would have frozen and chuckles turned to dry-throated coughing.

“But if you look at the history, modern chemistry only starts coming in to replace alchemy around the same time capitalism really gets going. Strange eh? What do you make of that?” Webb nodded agreeably. ” Maybe capitalism decided it didn’t need the old magic anymore.” An emphasis whose contempt was not meant to escape Merle’s attention. “Why bother, had their own magic, doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people’s sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement purposes.” (ATD p.79)

“Back in the spring, Dr. Tesla was able to achieve readings on his transformer of up to a millions volts. It does not take a prophet to see where this is headed. He is already talking in private about something he calls a ‘World-System’, for producing huge amounts of electrical power that anyone can tap in for free, anywhere in the world, because it uses the planet as an element in a gigantic resonant circuit. He is naïve enough to think he can get financing for this, from Pierpont, or me, or one or two others. It has escaped his mighty intellect that no one can make any money off an invention like that. To put up money for research into a system of free power would be to throw it away, and violate – hell, betray – the essence of everything modern history is supposed to be.” (…) “If such a system is ever produced,” Scarsdale Vibe was saying, “it will mean the end of the world not just’ as we know it’ but as anyone knows it. It is a weapon Professor, surely you see that – the most terrible weapon the world has seen, designed to destroy not armies or matériel, but the very nature of exchange, out Economy’s long struggle to evolve up out of the fish-market anarchy of all battling all to the rational systems of control we enjoy at present.”

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, p. 33/34

“An author who is writing specifically for a public is not really writing; it is the public that is writing, and for this reason the public can no longer be a reader; reading only appears to exist, actually it is nothing. This is why works created to be read are meaningless: no one reads them. This is why it is dangerous to write for other people, in order to evoke the speech of others and reveal them to themselves: the fact is that other people do not want to hear their own voices; they want to hear someone else’s voice, a voice that is real, profound, troubling like the truth.” p. 365

Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, Barrytown, Station Hill, 1999, p. 359-399.

Sometimes I can read Blanchot, and what he writes I find beautiful and deeply true. Sometimes I cannot read Blanchot, and what he writes is to me as words from an ideal, transcendental realm, unconnected to lived reality.

Let’s do a deconstruction.

I found a post on blogging by a professional from the marketing-world. Funny enough I found it by searching for mp3’s of James Chance and the Contortions, namely here: http://somevelvetblog.blogspot.com/.

The piece originally was posted here: http://www.mpdailyfix.com/ and comes from here: http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/kintz/, exactly: http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/kintz/archive/0001/01/01/1120.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN.

I’d like to deconstruct some of the assumptions in this post to bring into perspective how much the view of the marketing-world, and their idea of corporate blogging is rooted in an idea of publishing that is superseded by blogging. The funny thing is that the conlusions of the research and the advises taken from it, do correspond quite well with my own view on/feeling about blogging. But I’d say those things should’ve been clear from the start…

I will quote the whole text Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore from Eric Kintz — in italics — and add my commentary.

“Thou shall post every day” is the most fundamental and most well known principle of blogging….

– It never was. Only marketeers who’d like to reach out to an audience and have that audience stay with their blog, want this. Why would you like an audience to stay? The only real reason I can think of is: Google-ad revenue. Power? Having people read what you scribbled? My god, there are millions like you… Conversation? That comes from putting up good content. Not from blogging daily.

Every new blogger is warned about “the” ultimate rule and is confronted with the pressure of a day going by with no new post. Every one has in mind the examples of successful bloggers, like Robert Scoble at Microsoft, who post several times a day. Daily posting shows that you are serious about blogging, generates traffic and drives reader loyalty, as readers come back daily to check your new posts. You cannot be successful if you do not go by the rule, right? RIGHT?

– No. See above. Who wants to be like Robert Scoble?

Wrong. Daily posts are a legacy of a Web 1.0 mindset and early Web 2.0 days (meaning 12 months ago!). The pressure around posting frequency will ultimately become a significant barrier to the maturity of blogging. Here are 10 reasons why.

– Well, you have my attention now.

#1- Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting – The blogosphere doubles in size every 6 months and cutting through the clutter will become ever more difficult with a new blog emerging every second. Daily posting deals with the clutter by adding more clutter.

– Who cares about traffic? Only the ones who have (Google-)ads going? Participating in a community is important, but not because it generates traffic. (Want traffic? Write a bot that visits). But the next sentence is really troubling, it actually states that the idea is that the ideal is that we should go through the whole blogosphere every day… As if there is one blogosphere where everybody talks about the same subjects, a blogosphere that one can keep an eye on, in its whole. That idea is wrong. At least since Bacon and Locke discovered that there were more books around than they could ever read in a whole lifetime, it has been impossible to keep track of everything going on. The fact that the amount of postings doubles in size every 6 months is meaningless in this respect. One can only follow a fracture of it — indeed a few “communities”-of-interests that one participates in. “Daily posting deals with the clutter by adding more clutter” is exactly what blogging is about, and has always been about. Is that a paradox? It is what writes have always done. Bacon and Locke dealt with “information overload” by adding to it: making summaries, indexes, their own notes and commentaries.

Although this strategy made sense 12 months ago and still makes sense for the top bloggers, its effectiveness diminishes with every new blog created. Traffic is generated by successful bloggers linking to you either in their posts or in their blogroll. Mack at Viral Garden has a series of great posts on the importance of joining the community.

– Again: who cares about traffic? 99,9% of bloggers will never receive links from the top-bloggers (who are not characteristic of blogging at all, I think). Blogging goes on, and blooms in the realm of 1 to 30 visitors a day.

#2 – Traffic is irrelevant to your blog’s success anyway– Unless you specifically target bloggers like Bruce, are a blogging consultant or blog about your latest book, traffic is irrelevant to you. What matters most is whether you are reaching your target audience (which may be narrow and focused), not necessarily how many people read your posts. Engaging with the audience you want to have a relationship with is a much smarter strategy than posting frequently.

– Ah, now we’re talking. “Traffic is irrelevant. Engage with your audience!” True. Better still would be “Traffic is irrelevant. Write about what you are passionate. Don’t think about an audience.” Actually that’s already what Rebecca Blood advised years ago.

#3- Loyal readers coming back daily to check your posts is so Web 1.0 – As the blogosphere matures, the number of new readers and bloggers will decrease and loyal readers are going to matter more. I have heard many bloggers tell me that they will lose reader loyalty if these readers come back daily and do not see any new posts. This perception is still very strong although irrelevant. Loyal readers subscribe to your blog via RSS feeds and have new content pushed to them. They will remain loyal because they have subscribed, not because you post frequently.

– Now it starts to be interesting. Loyal readers subscribe through RSS. (Is that true? I subscribe to over a hundred feeds, yet prefer to visit the blogs themselves. Going through feeds is what I do when I’m offline). Actually the whole idea of loyal readers is I think much more “under threat” because most internet-users will find a blog thanks to a Google-search, and then migth explore that particular niche by clicking a few links (for instance from the linkslist or blogroll of that blog.) Or they might — technorati-style — follow a certain subject (technically a ‘tag’), being fed with bits and pieces from different blogs that are ‘tagged’ as that subject. In that way people read much more through different blogs than follow the blogs they are loyal to.

#4 - Frequent posting is actually starting to have a negative impact on loyalty: Seth Godin (a frequent blogger) has a very interesting theory.According to him, RSS fatigue is already setting in. With too many posts, you run the risk of losing loyal readers, overwhelmed by the clutter you generate. Readers will start to tune off if your blog takes up too much of their time.

– Well, what is the problem there? The only rule is: write what you are passionate about even if that means putting up enormous amounts of texts daily. If your text is a good one, you will be read, maybe not today or tomorrow, but in a few weeks time, or even later on. Is there a problem with newspapers, thousands daily writing about sometimes the exact same subjects? (A good style of writing is often one that uses words economically, that is true, and something else).

#5: Frequent posting keeps key senior executives and thought leaders out of the blogosphere – My colleagues and industry peers cite bandwidth constraints as the number one reason for not blogging. They are absolutely right: frequent posting is not very compatible with a high pressure job. As an example, not one single blog is authored by a senior corporate marketing blogger in the top 25 marketing blogs listed by Mack. Not only does the blogosphere lose valuable thought leadership, it runs the risk of being overlooked by these very same marketers.

– Ha ha. Those marketeers, concerned about the senior executives and ‘thought leaders’ –, the thought leaders are publishing on the web. (Okay, this text is about corporate blogging). And yes, blogging is time consuming. Did anyone ever say something else? Did anyone ever say that everyone should blog? Of course the senior executives are not blogging. Of course we hardly have fulltime nurses blogging. Is that a problem? Is it a problem that senior executives are not writing novels, shooting movies, uploading their favorite recipes?

A recent study by Forrester found a reluctance among marketers to shift from more tried-and-true online channels like search and e-mail marketing. Just 13 percent reported using blogs or social networks in marketing, and 49 percent said they had no plans to do so in the next year. If the blogosphere wants to become more mainstream (vs. being the latest hype), frequent posting and required bandwidth are undoubtedly a major barrier to adoption.

– Good. The less marketeers use the blogosphere, the better; also blogging might be exactly the opposite of marketing. But this sentence is troublesome: ” If the blogosphere wants to become more mainstream (vs. being the latest hype)”. Hmm, if almost everybody is blogging — 75 year old retired managers, 15 year olds from the MySpace-generation, and everybody in between — how to become, well, more ‘mainstream’ than that? The problem is here: blogging (and the internet in general) has shown that there is exactly no reason whatsoever to know who Madonna is, it has shown that ‘mainstream’ is an invention of mass-media — or at least a mass-media-phenomenon.

#6: Frequent posting drives poor content quality – The pressure of daily posting drives many bloggers to re-purpose other bloggers’ content or give quick un-insightful comments on the news. Few bloggers have enough time (or expertise) to write daily thought leadership pieces, thus adding to the clutter. Ben at the Church of the Customer Blog explores the 1% rule and cites the Wikipedia example: 25 million readers visit Wikipedia every month, but the number of people who actually contribute content to Wikipedia is about 1-2 percent of total site visitors. I would argue that the same is valid for the blogosphere as a whole where most of the original high value content is driven by 1% of the bloggers. Some of the most insightful –and most quoted- marketing thought blogging leaders are actually infrequent posters, from Sam Decker to Charlene Li or Randi Baseler.

– Good. Point taken. I think this is largely true as long as bloggers think they have to write about ‘what goes on in the media’. But the 1% original content sounds too pessimistic. It does not take into account that a lot of blogging exactly consists — not of putting up ‘original content’ — but in constructing a distributed conversation on a certain subject. Bloggers who ‘live’ in the same niche, react to each other. That is blogging. What is original content anyway?

#7: Frequent posting threatens the credibility of the blogosphere – as many bloggers re-purpose existing content under the pressure of daily posting, they do not take the time to do any sort of due diligence and conduct effective research. Errors snowball in the blogosphere as they spread from one blogger to the other. The collective wisdom of user generated content was supposed to provide an alternative to biased traditional media content – it is instead echoing the thoughts and biases of a few.

– Blogging is not journalism. Yet I agree that, if one takes blogging seriously, one should try to check sources, give the right references, et cetera. But I know I do not always do that. It’s the ‘freedom’ of blogging — in opposition to journalism — to be inexact, and say “it is inexact, sorry, but that’s how I felt”. An important part of our media literacy should be our competence of checking sources, being able to ascertain the credibility of a text.

#8 - Frequent posting will push corporate bloggers into the hands of PR agencies – As they struggle with bandwidth constraints as well as peer pressure to join the blogosphere, more and more companies will resort to partnering with their PR agencies to create blogs. The blogosphere will in turn lose some of its effectiveness and value.

– Yes. I think that is true. But do I care? I do not read those blogs. They hardly exist in my world. Btw: PR and blogging are very closely connected, at least in the Netherlands, and at least ever since financial minister Gerrit Zalm started a blog. Again: we readers should be able to tell what the interests are that are represented by a certain blog.

#9 - Frequent posting creates the equivalent of a blogging landfill – According to Technorati, only 55% of bloggers post after 3 months of existence. The pressure of the first months to write frequently certainly contributes to people abandoning their blogs. Is that in the blogosphere’s best interest to have a third of its participants frustrated by their initial efforts?

– Does the blogosphere care? Again I do not see what the problem is. A third of the people who start a blog find out that it is quite an effort to blog. It is not everybodies idea of a pasttime, apparently not everybodies idea of a way of dealing with the sheer amount of interesting stuff available. I agree that nobody should say that one should blog every day. (Whoever said that to begin with?)

#10 - I love my family too much - Ann pointed out to me this cool blog that highlights the challenges of blogging addiction – Bloggers Anonymous. Very funny…..

If you want to be a top 50 Technorati blogger, you will most probably still need to post several times a day. But for the rest of us, we should think seriously about the added value of frequent blogging. Actually, according to Technorati, only 11% of all blogs update weekly or more. What will matter more and more is what you write and how you engage, not how often you write.

– If you want to become a top 50 Technorati-blogger you are either ultra-american (culturally speaking) or you have a very strange idea of the world. It is as if you take up cycling as a pasttime with the ambition to win the Tour of France. So I agree whole-hearted with “What will matter more and more is what you write and how you engage, not how often you write”. But I think it has never been different.

As the blogosphere matures, the measure of success will shift from traffic to reader loyalty. As Seth Godin says in his post, “blogging with restraint, selectivity, cogency and brevity (okay, that’s a long way of saying “making every word count”) will use attention more efficiently and ought to win.” As for me, I will continue to post only when I have something to say.

– Well, I on the contrary sometimes blabber on. Also because I never know what will turn out the be important… not beforehand.

Just now read Jodi Dean’s paper on blogging for Hyperpolis. Very good, makes quite a few points I would’ve liked to make. I hope it’s allright with her that I already ‘reblog’ & pick some quotes (btw, these quotes do not capture her main point really):

“To be sure, words beyond control are a noted feature of writing. Academics, journalists, and bookwriters have long been familiar with the ways our words take on a life of their own. Blogging accentuates this new life. It makes more people aware of the ways that their words are not theirs.”

“Bloggers imagine communities. In part, they mark this imagining with their link lists. Yet, these lists are as (if not more) changing, uncertain, and porous as any other border.”

“My experience with blogs is that they allow for slower reflection, the emergence of spaces of affinity through specialized writing, and the experience of a presentation and cultivation of a self. These three attributes of blogs—reflection, affinity, self-cultivation—necessarily traverse the old liberal division of the world into public and private spheres.”

“A critical theory of blogging cannot extend out of presumptions of journalism, punditry, and relations to mainstream media. Instead, it has to begin from the communicative practices specific to blogging, practices that install confrontations with difference, with otherness.”

From Jodi Dean, Blogging Difference, 2006, paper for Hyperpolis, see http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2006/10/blogging_differ.html.

With regard to the last point I cite here — basically Jodi Dean’s conclusion — I agree in principle that yes, a critical theory of blogging should start with looking at communicative practices that are specific to blogging. But there are various types of blogs: some are focussed on conversations, some (like that of Jodi Dean) are indeed confrontations with the other (but isn’t all talk, and all writing in a sense a confrontation with otherness?) And then there are also the blogs, (notably some early ones) that are not conversational at all, that do not even want the confrontation, or who prefer to not even look at comments, if there are any. (Hey, why do I write this here and not in the comments of Jodi Dean’s blog? That characterizes me…. — supposing that trackbacking does the job?). Two extremes: there’s the blog as ‘my turf’, ‘my voice’ — and there’s the blog as an invitation to chat. And on a lot of blogs there’s not much ‘otherness’ of ‘confrontation’ going on… I should say that Jodi Dean tackles this issue as well in her paper (and looks at how a blog is also ‘me talking’), yet she emphasises the confrontation with otherness where I’d put more emphasis on the ‘publish for no public’-aspect.

Back in 1986 Michael Heim wrote in his book Electric Language: “A month in hyper-space can scatter the brain. Traditional books offer readers respite from hyperactivity. The book’s definitive, closed, linear argument lets mind and sensibility enjoy moments of inner harmony. Linear text offers the kind of contemplative thinking that goes beneath the surface” (xvi). Read “web” or ‘internet” or “blogosphere” for “hyperspace”. I’d say this is still true. But how much of this respite/contemplation do we need it to keep the world (and culture) running?

(Copy-pasted the quote from Dennis Jerz’s http://jerz.setonhill.edu/resources/blogtalk/index.html).