Wampum

I came to blogging late, and simply did the technical backend of Wampum, and the Koufax Awards. The writers and the writings that Dwight and MaryBeth cared about, and cared for, were out of my ken. Eventually I started writing, and kept on writing, and added some links to Wampum's sidebar.

Blogrolls are a gift to the reader, what the writer reads, or they are a gift to other writers, recipricated intentionally, or accidentally, or not at all. They are statements of peers, of similarly situated writers. I wasn't pleased to see the ad networks "encourage" their properties to replace the pre-commercial blogrolls with recitations of their properties.

Doing the Koufax votes I became aware that the distribution of votes and referrers was highly correlated, which is what you'd expect if "go vote" appeared in a link, but that wasn't the correlation of interest. That was just the ordinary venality of self-promotion, and most of those who cared about the Koufaxes were vastly more gracious, or self-depricating, than venal.

What I observed was that ip addresses associated with votes for A-lister URLs in any category were statistically unlikely be associated with any other URLs in any other category, and absent from nominations except in clusters associated with their subsequent, also clustered first and final ballots. Addresses associated with votes for non-A-lister URLs in any categoty were statistically likely to be associated with other URLs in other categories as well as with nominations, and more uniformly distributed.

We were being increassingly presented with cohorts of ip addresses that associated with very few blogs, either in nominations or rounds of balloting. After removing the obvious intentional stuffed ballots, what remained was fairly disturbing. Readers of the A-list read, or value sufficiently to nominate and/or vote for, very little else.

We were aware of mailing lists that coordinated message, and mailing lists that coordinated promotion, and demotion, of writers and writings, of ad networks, and attempted to raise the ranking, and revenue, of their initiators.

Blogroll Amnesty Day externalized and formalized that seperation of "worth" from "non-worth". It removed the mask of civility.

While I'm at it, there is another change on the left hand side of the dial that sucks. In '06 cycle there were about a hundred progressive challengers to incumbents on Cynthia Pool's NovemberVictory mailing list. I was on that list since I ran a race in that cycle. It was wicked painful to watch them attempt to get some mindshare, because everything everywhere was all Ned Lamont. Marcos Moulitas, Jane Hampshire, John Arvosis, Jerome Armstrong, yatta yatta -- it was all Ned Lamont, all the time. The congressional candidates on NovemberVictory got nothing. Nothing.

I hadn't looked at the A-listers, the "new media" outlets (formerly blogs and bboards) operated by Marcos Moulitas, Jane Hampshire, John Arvosis, Jerome Armstrong, yatta yatta in so long I'd forgotten their page layouts or how they manage their free content. They're properties of the Obama and Clinton campaigns, and what passes for writing varies between cult enthusiasm and obsessive compulsive disorder.

There has to be a better alternative. Fortunately, there is.