Big Days in the Blogosphere

I’ve been doing unusually well in the blog Ponzi scheme lately. Several bloggers I read and respect have linked to me, which is quite nice. The most flattering is these links from Doc Searls and John Walkenbach to my piece about RIAA and radio. Since this is mostly op-ed and not a linkfest, they are linking based on my commentary and not that I happened to be an early one pointing to some name generator or disturbing Asian porn. That felt very nice. I’ve long liked Doc and have traded some emails with him. We’re a generation apart, but we have similar feelings towards radio, having both DJed. Sadly, I believe I’m the last generation that had radio that one can really love and feel for. I strongly doubt that in 30 years anyone will be looking back fondly on present day Big Machine radio. I’m probably the last generation that used cart machines, edited by slicing tape with a razor blade and taping it back together and lots of other shit that no one will ever miss. Digital audio is an improvement on all that.

Another nice link is from Jim McGee (if I might be so familiar), who links to the piece from the other day about 10,000 ebooks. I follow his blog as well, having run across it in the Chicago localfeeds. A lot of the blogs I follow don’t show up in my blogroll since I access them that way. AKMA, for example, is one of those (as well as being the very closest blog to me in GeoURL) [scratch that, I just checked and there is one even closer now].

Another cool thing was having Bruce Sterling point me to a resource to get this Turkish rock CD that I really have been looking for since 1997. He did this in the comments of Another World is here. Everyone knows Bruce is, like, cool and all. I interviewed him for Reality Break back on Holy Fire and Schismatrix Plus. When was that, 1996 or so? It’s not like we are buddies or anything, but I have spent a half-hour on the phone with him talking in depth about his work. Cool guy, but he was actually kind of hard to interview. That hip irony that makes everyone like his work so much can make it hard to really engage with the person in a conversation, particularly a conversation bounded by the constraints of a radio phone interview. This is not to say he isn’t a great dude and fun to talk to, just that the fun and efficient interviewing are not pointed in the same direction on this compass. I did what I could, though, and the interview turned out quite nice. Many years on, it is quite cool to have him helping me out on my Turkish pop hunt. But I’m digressing a little.

I can feel the difference in traffic based on the above mentioned links. I’ve had more writeback feedback today than in any single day since I started this 18 months ago. I like it. After laboring in relative obscurity for so long, its nice to feel like a participating member of a community, one engaging in this big distributed conversation. I feel less like I’m doing what we called in grad school “Write Only” work – stuff you write that no one ever reads. Long live the blogroll Ponzi scheme!

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Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.