Joe's "True blogs"

Joe Frog was wondering how sorted the South African blogosphere is now that Amatomu is on the scene.  His commentary centred around three areas - "True blogs", "local traffic patterns", and "locally-hosted content".  I was writing a comment there until I realised it was a bit long.

True blogs 

The "True blogs" is perhaps the most contentious and problematic concept to discuss - because everyone does have an idea of what a "true blog" is, and they are all right, in a way.

Were I to worry where I am located in the stats, it would be terrible for me to know that I am the #500  most interesting person in the South African blogosphere.  But it wouldn't be so bad, if the #500 means "blogs" which includes 400 news sites, 50 mass-blogging sites, and so forth.  If I ended up at #25 of the personal blogs - the "true blogs" in my "personal blogger" mindset, then I'd feel quite good.  But I'd be a little irritated that I'd have to self-justify this to myself whenever I looked at the stats.  (Hourly, I'm sure, in this mindset.)

The #1 technology blog, and #3 overall blog, at the time of writing is Tectonic, the great news site started by Alastair Otter.  Because of my long-time admiration of it, it would be hard for me to support a definition of "true blog" that would deny them access.  The core content comes from three or so reporters who put a lot of effort into generating content - and is the primary source of news on the local open source scene (again, admitting my bias).

On the other hand, if IOL (which, since I was lead developer there for some time, I have an attachment to as well) was suddenly a "blog", it would devalue the meaning of the listings.  And, frankly, mainstream media is a lot of what people who follow blogs are looking for an alternative for.  The fact that IOL is primarily an aggregation of mainstream media stories - of articles that were in a newspaper or which arrived from a press feed - must deny them the title "blog".

Similarly to Tectonic, #3 politics blog, Commentary, is obviously a "true blog" with its three core contributors (I think there's been the occasional post by others - someone can correct me if it bothers them).  But I find it hard to justify #28 overall, My Broadband and My ADSL blogs, as a "true blog" (sorry to take it out on you - nothing personal, you're just the first to catch my eye).

Maybe it's about coherency and consistency: Commentary is very much about politics; it's what makes Commentary what it is.  But group blogs (even though there seem to be only six or so people there) like My Broadband and My ADSL blogs, it's more like six separate voices through one funnel.  It's like those interested in Commentary are almost always going to be interested in everything said, due to the cohesive content, but I wouldn't like to have to listen to the other voices if I found a particular author on a group blog when adding the RSS feed.  If there's a separate RSS feed for each contributor, they should each be separate (or we'd have to treat dotnet.org.za with its 20+ bloggers with separate blogs as just one "blog" as well).

Beyond this, is there much we can do beyond classifying blogs as "personal", "company", "news", and so forth, and managing the list separately?  And what advantage is there to this beyond soothing a few bruised egos?

Well, for me, I'm just not interested in blogs that don't discuss personal feelings on news items.  Unless you're Andrew Sullivan, you just don't get to write personal feelings on the news with more than a few items a day.  I don't want to know _what_ happened, I want to know what people I respect think is important enough to talk about, and what their feelings on it are.  The value of Keo is much higher than the value of "rugby24.com" which just regurgitates what's happening in rugby.

Local traffic patterns

Local traffic patterns is an interesting subject, but not much to discuss.

As someone whose content is primarily of interest to two rather small niches - a larger group of open source (primarily Python) developers, and a much smaller group of South African open source people, I'd be rather unhappy that simply because there aren't many South African open source (primarily Python) developers that my "South African-ness" rating suffers.  I'm a South African, and I generate all my content myself.  I don't "point" much, and when I do, it's for South African content (usually news about open source events).  I write code, and walk people through the code.  I explain how to do things.  If I'm not doing that, I'm giving personal opinion.

On the other hand, one has to wonder if something like Engadget (were it written by South Africans, or even hosted in South Africa (haha)) should be counted as a "South African blog", since its traffic would almost exclusively be from international visitors.

Something like GeoIP could be used to capture the data easily enough - but how to display it?

Locally-hosted content

Well, this is a no-brainer.  I can't get hosting in this country for nearly as cheaply as I can from elsewhere.  I don't run some boring blog-clone hosted on typepad or Blogspot, or run a blog-clone on my own Wordpress instance - I wrote my own damn blog software, and it doesn't use some lowest-common-denominator programming language!  And, well, I'm a bit of a geek, so I want root on the machine, and it'll run all sorts of other things besides a web site!  And it must have a decent amount of memory (512MB+), or I couldn't do lots of stuff I'd like to do!

Of course, I'd love to be hosted locally for the same amount of money I pay now (or even 25% more) for the exact same level of service - in terms of uptime, latency, bandwidth, and traffic costs.  But it's really not of interest to a service like Amatomu.