Posted by Daniel Sun, 12 Feb 2006 04:16:32 GMT

Offense post:

In New Gatekeepers Are Still *GATEKEEPERS*, Seth Finkelstein calls my post yesterday on the matter of gatekeeping wrong and worse:

...to be told that a page sitting out on the end of the Long Tail is somehow equal to that sort of megaphone, because everybody could *in theory* read it. They won't, and to say otherwise starts to become downright cruel.

Maybe he's right. I don't know.

I feel I'm in some kind of bind here.

I have this idea that the blogosphere is the one place in the world — or perhaps an entirely new world, or a part of a new world, created on the Net — where there is no need for class, for caste, for gates or keepers of anything.

[There's something, I can't tell you what it is, that makes folks read some blogs and not others... or others as much. It's easy to whine that someone in the tail isn't going to be read... and yet somehow folks have come along long after blogging got started and still manage to be part of the head rather than the tail. How is that? If you're there and you continuously write cogently and smartly about the topics that matter to people you'll get recommended, and sooner or later you'll be "discovered" and the rest will be history ( how's that for temporal vagueness?). The reverse is equally true... you can be pointed to by any number of A-List bloggers and if you have nothing to say, or you don't say it often enough, or your just boring regardless of how smart you may be you'll never take off no matter who points to you. This argument is made about the NEA. A lot of artists feel that if you can't get the public to support your art then it's a failed effort. Not everyone believes that art must be or should be incubated by government patronage. It's a gray area for me, but I think the idea is the similar. ]
Source: Doc Searls