Interviewee

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I was 'interviewed' the other day by a journalist who wanted to know more about the blogging community, such as it is. Below find some edited highlights...

Tell me about the NY blogging community? Is it tight-knit, are people friends offline, how do people use each other. - just a nice overview...

Well, it's really hard to say. According to nycbloggers.com, there are more than 1600 NYC blogs out there. So obviously, you're not going to be best friends with every single blogger out there. Certainly parts of it are fairly closely-knit; I've had bloggers over to my house to play poker and stuff. But I think that it's hard to speak of a single unified 'NY blogging community'.

What do bloggers generally try to get across in their journals?

That's a tough one. A lot of bloggers (probably a majority of them) use their blogs as a kind of on-line diary. Some bloggers use their blogs as political pulpits; some write about sports; some write about intensely geeky stuff. It's really a very mixed bag.

Having said that, I think that the one thing that all bloggers have in common is a strong sense that they have something to say and that what they have to say (be it about dating, baseball, religion, or the inner workings of the Linux 2.4 kernel) is important and needs to be heard.

Another common thread is that bloggers, as a group, tend to be comfortable expressing themselves with the written word. I don't know if it's a side-effect or what, but most blogs are well-written from a mechanical standpoint (spelling, grammar, and the like). This doesn't sound like front page news, but it's something of a refreshing change from what writing standards are like in the real world.

Tell me a bit about an average blogger...

NYC Bloggers can range from 17-year-old high-school students to gay investment bankers to fortysomething married attorneys who work for the Justice Department. So it'd hard to say that there's an 'average' blogger.

Having said that, I'll give you a portrait of "Jane Blogger", a composite of several real bloggers I know ("Jane" because I think that there are slightly more female bloggers than male bloggers). Jane is 25, had a job at a .com but was laid off when the company went under; she's currently working as a freelance graphic designer. She lives in Brooklyn, having moved there recently from the East Village. She went to a fairly prestigious private East Coast college and is working hard on getting her student loans paid off. She is currently between boyfriends and writes about that extensively on her blog. Only a select few of her real-life friends know about her blog, and she would die of shame should her parents ever discover it.

And tell me about your own blogging style.

Well, I pretty much write mostly about stuff that happens to me -- my site leans towards the diarist style of blog. Occasionally, when I have nothing to write about, I'll write about what everyone else is writing about. I avoid politics, for the most part. There's a little sports blogging, and a little food blogging, too.

For a diarist-type site, though, I'm fairly cagey about what I actually write. I lost my job a few months ago, and instead of penning 2,000 words on how tragic it was, I simply slipped it into the bottom of a totally unrelated post a few days after the fact.

I try to maintain a fairly light-hearted tone, though that was rather difficult last September. Much of what I write is dryly funny, though it's not always as funny as I want it to be.

Please tell me about an average blogger meetup, either through Bloggerpalooza, or through some of the smaller 'meet at bars and drink' type get-togethers.

The big blogger bashes tend to take place at public venues; this is largely due to the fact that pretty much no-one has an apartment large enough (one of the drawbacks to Manhattan real estate). They run rather late, and everyone wears a nametag (due the fact that many people are meeting each other for only the first time).

It's my take that most bloggers are fairly articulate (they do, after all, blog), and most of them are interesting people who have interesting things to say. So in that sense, it's a better way to meet people than just walking up to random folks in a bar.

12 Comments

well written ol' boy. i tend to think the ny and sf blogger communities are more interesting, perhaps even more dynamic compared to the vancouver, bc scene.

No longer a Jane Doe... I am a Jane Blogger.

Perhaps you should emphasize the fact that these are the good/successful blogs you're talking about?

I keep on looking at some of my friend's Xangas, and frankly, I'm surprised that I can still talk to them in real life.

Wait, W, does that mean that you actually think that this is a good blog?

It's so funny how this blogging thing has become a sociological phenomena, I talk about this new-found sense of community one has to my non-blog friends all the time - case in point: the relationship between Jason Royal - www.completesquare.org/index.html - and Sarah Brown - www.queserasera.blogspot.com - and all their wacky pals.

ah yes jane blogger. i knew there was a reason i didn't write about my exploits online...people in know in real life real my blog - so yes dammit, i edit my content.

Well, take a look at a few of the blogs on the Stuy '03 Xanga ring...

Maybe I should make "Jane Blogger" T-Shirts?

Dude, I thought you knew that I was the quintessential average blogger. I speak for the fricking masses!

No, Donk... you speak for Barbie. ;)
I'd buy a Jane Blogger t-shirt.

What about the non-fricking masses?

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