Greetings Economists, LP writes, The blog has emerged as an important Internet medium. Unlike the more horizontally oriented mailing list (let alone the anarchistically free-for-all usenet), the blog is essentially a vertical medium. Some personality with a bit of name recognition will set up a blog and hold forth on various topics.
and LP writes, Perhaps the most open recognition of this goal is the aptly named "Max Speak, You Listen", the blog of Max Sawicky, an economist at EPI. Doyle, I think LP is not accurately describing the information generating properties of blogs. Since LP brought up Max's blog one might ask why Max's blog is growing a stronger voice than say Pen-L? First of all I think the description about horizontally oriented mailing lists and vertical lists of blogs is not a deep enough analysis of the two types of communication. Especially the parallel with academics seems to me to not capture the production process. With the Maxspeak blog the relative content of Max's content is substantially more complex and in depth than the average Pen-L commentary. The chart references and commentary are much more in depth. Now it's true that it's lead by Max, but comments are as often at least as thoughtful as Pen-L comments. On the main in fact there seems to be a relationship between the personal connection of the readers to a specific voice that encourages a stronger voice in the comments and deeper tie in the readers. Maxspeak also runs into the problem that blogs have not solved. With 8000 unique visitors per day the connection between Max and community is at best tenuous. The remoteness of the blogger's role to their audience is directly related to how much a blogger can actually respond to the whole audience the upper bound for a really active social butterfly being about 1 or 2 thousand unique visitors. That's really the issue about horizontal and vertical issues arise. The connection process of blogs is very primitive. For example I'll point to the main collaborator on Maxspeak, the Sandwich Man. Max referred to him as his Ed McMahon. Which I wonder about how much true horizontal relationship they feel for each other. It sounds unequal. Probably that just means they are ignoring the problem of the connection process more than their politics is arrogant and unfeeling. However they usually write their own piece with little or nothing seemingly shared. The connection process reflects something like this. A child learns the accents and language of their parents. That is a collaborative connection process. The parent role is often authoritative, but children demand a lot of parents. It may be unequal in some ways but the flow back and forth in creating a common connection is quite powerful. So it goes with friendships and sexual partners as well. In a text based site like Maxspeak one could say that the two of them could work on a single published essay, but the two of them usually don't do that. One could easily imagine collaborating on single document. The old Sid Caesar show where comedy writers sat together and threw out ideas for the weekly show and someone collected the jokes and sewed them together is good live version of collaboration. I also think LP ignores the asynchronous nature of mail lists and blogs. Unlike real time conversation the capacity to add content depth through asynchrony makes a significant difference to the academic example LP reaches for. I think the analogy with academia is faulty and the analysis that refers to horizontal and vertical organization of information is too superficial. One could easily imagine in a technical sense through P2P techniques doing what Max does, and utilizing the closer emotional ties that his blog engenders to build a left strong organization of a new type. I think Max is a pioneer of a direction in left thought. Primarily in the easy touch with humor and analytical depth. I don't think Max has mastered collaboration or the theory of it. Also Sandwichman is not well showcased for his virtues in Maxspeak. These weaknesses of the concept over time will be addressed by new teams that have more of focus on collaboration processes. But the example comparing the Maxspeak weblog with Pen-L gives a sense of how to think about the left on the internet that is well worth considering. Not in the sense that LP says of horizontal and vertical but greater connection between audience and the left talker. thanks, Doyle
