Sunday, July 13, 2008

Jason Calacanis retires from blogging.

This might all be tedious "A-lister" posturing, except, one of the symptoms we should be seeing in a shift from capitalism to netocracy is the increasing recognition of, and valorization of, the private and the exclusive.

Over time "mass", including the ability to reach many people, will give way to "fine tuning" (connection with the right people at the right time.) Even if the mails are reblogged, there's still a delay. The faster the world gets, the more significant that slight advantage gets.

Calacanis is clever and experimental. This may be a trivial move, or a regression to an earlier mode. Or may be genuine netocratic imploitation. ("Investment" in the next economy.)

2 comments:

John Powers said...

I love your blogs;-)

Neither here nor there, I installed Firefox 3.0 and the Clusty toolbar isn't compatible, so I'm back to using Google more frequently. Searching "netocracy" on Google thelink
to your review comes up via Manuel at Buckybase. Searching via Clusty gives lots more relevant results, at least your content is much better represented. For example your review is #3 on the Web search. On the Clusty search of blogs 11 of the 14 results are to you.

I have such mixed feelings about Netocracy. Certainly I agree with you that Jason Calacanis's retirement from blogging is possibly not-trivial. I did cock my head a bit with his choice of an email list; that particular choice has a peculiarly netocratic stink to it.

Most of my online writing is in YASNs now. I'm not sure I care how many people see what I write, most of it doesn't make all that much sense. But there are often times when I think something I write in a social network would be well put on my blog since I hardly ever post anymore. The problem is references to others within the YSAN are hard to edit out. I mean somehow someone else deserves attribution, yet there's somewhat an expectation to protect the garden walls of the YSAN. Some of the advantage of "community" are also disadvantages.

I rarely see mean comments at most of the blogs I follow. Most of the blogs are far from A-listers. The heavy trafficked blogs I read are firmly moderated. Meanness sucks, but find it hard to accept that Calacanis was really bothered that much by it. His analogy about bringing the wino out of the alley to comment on a virtuoso violin performance seemed over the top: So very aristocratic of him, which goes right to your point about Netocracy.

Here's my prediciton. The email list will fizzle. I don't think it will create enough frisson to make it interesting and worthwhile for him. Then again if I had 1000 readers of a blog that would be plenty to keep me at it.

Composing said...

Hi John,

love your blog too. Don't let it die!

I agree there is something compelling about writing in YASNS ... it's the immediacy of the conversation. That provides greater stimulation than writing to yourself. At the same time, I regret that there's no way of pulling out a lot of what I wrote on Tribe and somehow making it more accessible. I can't even remember what I wrote there a couple of years ago!

The answer, I guess, is going to be new tools : what Haque calls "reconstructors". Friendfeed etc. are an early example of aggregating your stuff in one place.

But we also need more user-interfaces than just ongoing rivers. Not all communication works that way ... at some point we'll need to represent trees of threaded / filterable discussion which is pulled from multiple sources.

I'm very ambivalent about Netocracy. I hope when I write about it, it sounds both thrilling AND scary. (Which is how I feel about it.)