The recent flurry of meta weblog discussion continues. Why this is happening now is unclear to me. Is it just the linguistic gas supplied by Chris Locke?

While I'm gassed that Jim would think so, I find it more interesting that many definitions tend to be reductive. Look for words and phrases like "simply" and "really just" and "nothing but," which usually signal such reductions. A blog is simply a diary. A blog is really just a journal. A blog is nothing but a web page. For instance, Steve writes in part:

Blogging is simply history repeating itself, except this time the technology is just more sophisticated. People have really been blogging since the beginning of time in one form or another. Call them meme's, call them diaries, call them journals -- call them whatever you want. Whatever the term, the one common denominator is that blogs offer an individual's perspective and observations of the world around them.

Nearly 20 years ago, standing at a Tokyo news kiosk, I read an interview with Keith Richards in which he said he saw Mick Jagger and himself as being in direct line of descent from antique bards and medieval troubadours. In place of "Let It Bleed" and "Sympathy For the Devil," I suddenly flashed on the lyric poet-musicians of the 12th century, on Beowulf, Homer, and even further back to bones and rattles and skin drums around some Neolithic campfire.

Although Steve's post cites (i.e., hyperlinks) contributions to this "thread" -- very loosely construed as such -- from Dave Winer, Doc Searls, Tom Matrullo, and myself, he misses important entries in the conversation from Mike Sanders, J.D. Lasica and others quickly becoming too numerous to mention.

The point is not to fault Steve's citations, but rather to surface the significance of the too-numerous-to-mention dynamic, which seems to be an inherent quality of blogspace. And which, I think, begins to provide some kind of delta from other forms -- both online and off -- that blogs do not so easily reduce to.

Perhaps a recent exchange -- or more accurately, a non-exchange -- with my friend and co-author David Weinberger will make this more concrete. It did for me. Last week, I sent the following mail to Doc Searls, Dave Winer. Robert Scoble, Tom Matrullo, Eric Norlin, Marek, Martin Jensen, Elizabeth Locke (my sister), and David Weinberger.

Sent: Saturday, November 10, 2001 8:50 AM
Subject: language: it's a virus

Fully realizing that your mileage may vary, I nonetheless ask you, pretty please, to propagate and amplify:

Sex, Lies and... Marketing
http://www.rageboy.com/2001_11_01_blogger-archive.html#7015572

Call it whatever you will. The "meme" debate is a red herring. A McGuffin. For them what may need it:

http://www.bencom.tm/mcguffin.htm

But whatever you call it, I guess it proves what William Burroughs propagated and Laurie Anderson amplified -- language: it's a virus.

perhaps one of you could fwd this to Mike Sanders -- don't have his address, though much of that screed is addressed to him. ;-)

with best regards all round,

chris

Please understand that David's not a dumb guy. Far from it. (Not as dumb as he looks anyway.) Although he had not been a part of the discussion up to that point, I included him thinking these were issues he had some interest in (in fact, I know they are).

I wrote back to David: "Well, I was looking for a little SUPPORT, actually" (as Winer was kicking my ass bigtime, and I was looking for ammo to kick his ass back; etc., so it goes.)

And David replied: "Support for WHAT? I have no idea what the two of you are on about or why I'm on this mailing list. Or why anyone else is. Or why that particular set of people is."

However -- the plot thickening, as plots will -- at the same time that Weinberger was basically going "HUH??? WTF???," the cluetrain list -- of which David is a regular denizen -- was awash in these very same issues. Note two things here:

1. The cluetrain list was discussing these questions largely BECAUSE they'd first been surfaced in BLOGSPACE. In fact, several members of the list who span both "worlds" (Tom Matrullo, Doc Searls, Marek J., Eric Norlin, etc) seem to have propagated (and amplified) these questions from blogspace to listspace -- plus weblogger Robert Scoble seems to have joined the cluetrain list during this same period.

2. David Weinberger had no idea where this sudden upsurge of blog discussion had come from -- the very discussion I was pointing him into the heart of -- because David is not tuned in to blogspace.

Actually, what interests me most about weblogs is (you should forgive the expression), memic propagation and amplification. And if there's one thing that EGR (and by extension, or implosion, or somesuch, RB) gets off on, it's... that's right, you guessed it: memic propagation and amplification.

"This is evil genius stuff," Doc wrote later, "and nobody is better at it than RageBoy."

Are you confused yet? If not, you're probably a weblogger. If so, you're probably not. Trying to explain to David Weinberger a) WHAT had happened that I thought he might find significant, b) WHY he might find it significant, and c) precisely HOW it had happened, would be like trying to tell a stranger about rock & roll. Or a blind man about the color of an orange. What I was trying to point David to was like a "location joke" -- you had to be there.

The complexity of blogspace -- and the immersive engagement this complexity calls for -- are closely related to something I wrote about in Gonzo Marketing:

...this exercise smacks of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls "thick description." Using a complicated tale about sheep and thieves and justice and the lack of it in colonial North Africa in 1912, he demonstrates that any time we attempt to describe "a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or whatever," we end up spinning stories about other people�s stories about yet other people�s stories, and sorting it all out becomes next to impossible. It�s a rich tapestry, and thick description, while it may seem confusing, often comes closer to what�s actually going on than would "thin description" -- the kind of succinct clear-cut abstraction that appears perfectly plausible, but totally distorts reality. Not that I'm claiming any methodological rigor in these musings, but the thickness I'm attempting to suggest is what music and painting and literature -- what we roughly call The Arts -- typically point to. And what the specialized languages of logic and science and business typically do not. It�s a Zen sort of thing you could say. I could say; who�s to stop me? Finger indicating moon-illuminated finger. The thickness of life as life is lived between the inexorable poles of birth and death. "Man is an animal suspended," says Geertz, "in webs of significance he himself has spun."

Webs, yes. And although the Big Daddy Web did not exist when that was written, that�s why the choice of quote. That�s where we're headed. It�s where we already are. But wait. Though we have these words for our current situation -- words like Internet and World Wide Web -- it seems to me they obscure at least as much as they explain. Because networks are inherently social realities, any attempt to definitively say what they are becomes immediately suspect. It depends on where you're standing when you look at them, and what sort of baggage you've brought along to the observation deck.

It'd be a lot like asking: so whaddya think about Islam?

It's not any one post that makes a meme; not any one event that makes a culture. Actually, Winer has it right: it's the cloud of cross-polinating, trans-resonating ideas that has developed in blogspace that makes blogspace different from the web that came before -- and that will create the web that comes after whatever it is we're doing here.

This is some deep shit, bro. Word up.