I have to laugh. Some of my sites have exploded (more like bottle rocket, not nuclear) this week and sitemeter has been mostly down for days because they're moving their servers. Go figure.
I've been a blog watcher since before I ever got on xanga, which was 2004. I followed Michael J. Straczynski around on message boards, fought gang wars with Sliders and Xena fans that we though would explode the internet, ran groups and chats, and absolutely flipped out that no one was bringing up how The Lone Gunmen practically showed us how to take out the World Trade Center mere months before it really happened, and then the show just disappeared. I know a guy who hosted a Star Trek marathon wearing Spock ears on our local tv station back in the 80's. We were underground awesome before it was cool to geek out. Before other people ever started blogging, we were like human webcrawlers. Before blogging became a numbers game, we were forming conventions and group emails were flying all over the country.
When the internet got bigger this last decade, I was thrilled. My idea of internet was how cool it will be to have everything ever known to man catalogued and organized for easy access. Instead of laboriously digging through ancient books in old libraries, now we're zipping straight into a Trek-like future where everything ever known is commonly warehoused everywhere you go, and you simply ask a computer for information about *anything*, and ~voila~. For example, how about the movie A Sound of Thunder which came out in 2005. I saw that and was all *omgwheredidIreadthatbook*, because back in the 70's I read the short story. Well, sooner or later Wikipedia is going to have everything, because here it is, Ray Bradbury got it published in 1952. And that's what internet should be, an extension of my brain that helps me keep track of and remember things, as well as interact in a very timely manner all over the planet.
But the sport I love most is blog watching. When I first started blogging I had no idea what was going on, but it didn't take long to figure out, because once everything in media turned into blogging, that became the new interactive gaming for the intellectual. Or psueudointellectual. Or anyone preying on anyone else who can halfway phonetically spell well enough to encourage interchange, because boy have those ads taken over. Blogging is such a huge industry that money magically makes itself every time people flock around media sites. Commenting is the new hamster wheel, generating more and more interaction, and the worth of a blog becomes the sine of the tangent squared of the comments over the pi to the second crap of the traffic which that blog drives to the ads, and anyone can get in on the action now, just like buying and selling stocks over your computer at home.
Once a blog hits a certain threshold, the hits keep coming in with minimal maintenance because other blog sites are busy grabbing and reproducing the posts and linking back to that blog. This has gotten so complex that sometimes I hunt high and low for an original source and can never find it. Once something, however out of context, hits media blogging, it's a throw of the dice if you'll ever find a link back to the REAL original site, because all that is legally required now is to link back to where you're quoting from, and that absolves you of any claim to how real or true what you just reposted may be. I think the only logical thing the comment squabbling goes on about nowadays is whether something might be truly misquoted, but the mangling all that goes through during comments only proves that the more you misquote, the more money you can make. Likewise, opinions have always been weightier than truth, but nothing breathes more life into opinionating than blogging, and blogging is a money machine, so the more opinions spew out, the more money can be generated because more commenting drives more traffic through the ads. The more the world squabbles, the richer someone is becoming...
Lately there is a broohaha going on over Nathan Fillion's response to a request for a photo of him with a piece of twine. Staunch fans who know what the heck is going on are lining up and taking sides, and it's actually kinda funny that right now The Bloggess has actually got more clout to make an impact if she's getting 500 comments over that and he's not...
See, THAT is what the game is all about. How many people can you get to talk about you? If you can get ONE person full of hellbent fans to respond to you like that, you virtually win the game, or you can up the ante and go into high stakes poker with your own hellbent followers. This is what blog watching is all about. That and watching Michio Kaku's twitter get hacked LIVE because I'm up at 3 a.m. watching Olympic feeds on Twitter, and all the trending responses about the hack from Michio's followers were better than watching Comedy Central.
Live response is where I'm at. I'm enjoying the summer so far, watching my twitter feeds during live Merlin filming at Pierrefonds in France, thanks to the fans who were able to hang out there, and live during the San Diego Comic Con, thanks to all the fans and podcasts and actors tweeting their hearts out. Both of those went on for weeks, and I was nearly exhausted by the time it was all over from trying to keep up with the thousands of pictures and videos and blogs being linked.
Now I'm back to watching the entire world fuss back and forth about football coming up, and I'm watching my internal trackers, which aren't that great because I don't get IPs and very good locations like I do with sitemeter, so I'll wave a general hello back just in case some of those footprints happen to be people I know from former glory days. And the rest of you, don't want to leave anyone out.
I believe in our earth being the Magrathean super computer designed by Deep Thought in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and we're all a tiny part of it. The answer to life, the universe, and everything is nearly in our grasp now.
