My obligation to you...
I feel a personal obligation to the people who read this site and to the world at large not to lie in my posts. I feel a personal obligation not to mischaracterise the truth and to correct any mistakes I make. I feel a personal obligation not to lie by omission. I consider it part of every human being's duty to stand up and fight for what they believe in whenever the feel capable of doing so in whatever way they feel they can. I feel an obligation to foreground any conflicts of interest I might have.
I feel a very different kind of obligation to the friends that I've made online and the community that has grown up around this site, and to the communities that have formed between all of our sites. I have no desire to anger anyone, frustrate anyone or humiliate anyone. I believe very strongly in the power of reasonable debate, trying - whenever possible - to avoid blatant rhetoric and appeals to emotion, territorialism and nationalism in favour of serious attempts to find some kind of reasonable, workable solution or truth.
Much like Mark Pilgrim, I feel absolutely no obligation whatsoever to write to entertain the people who read this site. This is my space to be able to speak my mind or make whatever contribution to the world that I want to make. I feel absolutely no obligation whatsoever to change what I'm interested in writing in to fit the desires or needs of people who read this site. Nor do I feel any obligation whatsoever to avoid talking about things that they are not interested in reading or comfortable reading.
I believe very strongly that my site is a representation of myself in cyberspace - and I think that's true for a lot of people who run personal sites wth weblog software. It is not a publishing venture. I have no potential revenues. I have no obligation or desire to maximise traffic for myself simply in order to get money. And for that reason I don't feel an obligation to target demographics precisely or maintain any form of continuity on my site other than to say, "I wrote this. The thread through all this stuff is that it matters to me".
If I was to self-censor and self-adapt purely in order to write for our audience's desires alone (however big, however small), then the thin cord that separates our online selves from our offline selves would be severed. Our sites would become little more than costumes we wore - and I think that would be a betrayal of ourselves and the dozens of overlapping communities that each of us belongs to.
So on the days when I write things that you enjoy - relish it! Get pleasure from it! Sometimes people out there even get commercial benefits from stuff that I write - and that's fine! Enjoy it - I want you to! And on the days when I say something that angers and infuriates you, tell me! Write to me and correct me or explain to me why I'm wrong. I want to know. I want to learn. And if it turns out that what I want to write about doesn't interest you, then that's fine - go elsewhere - there's a world of sites out there to read. And you never know - I might even register your absence and try and mend my ways...
But I swear to god, the next person who tries to tell me what I should and shouldn't be writing on my own site - which I produce for free and for which I ask nothing in exchange - is going to get a kick up the arse so fucking hard that when they finally land again they'll have frost in their hair...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
Someone needs to write up the Five Stages of a Weblogger because surely one of them is when he gets fed up with people who complain about their content in some fashion. Seems to happen a lot, of course most especially to those who have a dedicated readership who have decided that said weblogger is writing about one thing that interests them. When that one thing gets mixed in with other things some people seem to believe thats wrong. As writers each of us struggles to find their voice and in doing so it sometimes changes - and people need to deal with that.
Hopefully you can move on to the next stage quickly. :-)
Keep up the good work...
→ Posted by: john at June 24, 2003 2:39 PM
I am a big fan of Plastig Bag, Tom. Thank you !
→ Posted by: jb at June 24, 2003 3:08 PM
Interesting post. Been considering this myself. Some friends have told me they don't think such-and-such is a good idea and that I should just write about this kind of stuff, as if my website journal was solely to provide an entertaining read to bored office workers on a Monday morning. The suggestion is that I should make sure the one after the weekend hits the lowest common denominator...put the arcane and overly esoteric stuff somewhere else on the site, etc etc.
I find that when I start visualizing "my audience" (gawd) one way or another way I just dunno what to write. The bottom line is that the readers of a website come to it for all sorts of reasons, and if you try to even out what you're talking about I suspect you just end up with the flat line on the heart monitor. And you're not representing yourself fully then anyway. I like writing stuff that might appeal to anybody, but then I also like writing things that about 2 people in the entire world will ever take any interest in (and they probably haven't found the site yet).
So you're dead right, and it's a useful reminder.
As for that link to "dive into mark", that was astonishing! If someone wrote me an email like that I think I'd send them one back telling them why I was coming round there right now to throw a brick through their fucking window.
Of course we care what people think about what we do with our websites, and it's lying to ourselves to think otherwise because sometimes they may just be right, but on the other hand it's useful to remember that the world is full of shits and some of them may just be reading your website.
Cheers
→ Posted by: Joel at June 24, 2003 3:27 PM
I was having a vaguely similar converstation to this with a friend the other week, the upshot being that (and I know this is a hoary old cliche) that people seem to use the perceived anonymity or impersonality of the internet to behave in what frequently seems like extraordinarily rude or hurtful terms. Being generous, perhaps some of this is due to tones of voice or subtleties or whatever not transferring well into writing. Unfortunately, like Joel says, there are some people who are just rude bastards...
For me, the bottom line is that, as you say, Tom, a weblog is often an representation of yourself and therefore people could have a greater or lesser amount of emotional investment in them whether or not someone else might read it as inane or boring or whatever. So to post shitty comments or otherwise put someone down just because they have the facility to do that is pretty unforgivable, in my opinion...
Hope that's not too rambling!
→ Posted by: Phil at June 24, 2003 4:59 PM
By "converstations" I mean "conversations". D'oh!
→ Posted by: Phil at June 24, 2003 5:10 PM
I watch the Colorado Avalanche, therefore it's "my" team. When they start choking, I'm damn well going to tell them how they'll improve their game. When plasticbag.org, "my" weblog, starts boring me, I'm going to speak up and tell you to change it to better suit what I want to see. (please don't confuse first-person narrative for actual opinion in either case) Some people are interesting, while most are not. Those that are boring naturally flock to the interesting. Somewhere along the way, a sense of personal ownership, possibly belonging creeps into the picture. I think people forget that there actually is someone on the other end of the text box.
→ Posted by: Dave S. at June 24, 2003 6:07 PM
You know if you wrote some stuff for Windows users now and again you might get a few more readers.
→ Posted by: arseblogger at June 24, 2003 8:55 PM
I enjoy your blog very much, but if you ever change that picture of Orford Castle then I'm off.
→ Posted by: James Wallis at June 24, 2003 9:57 PM
I think you should write purely about David Beckham in order to become more popular.
→ Posted by: Mark Anderson at June 25, 2003 1:17 AM
Windows readers!? I don't want people like that on my site!
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at June 25, 2003 1:19 AM
Who's David Beckham?
→ Posted by: Ernie Hsiung at June 25, 2003 7:23 AM
David Beckham plays left back for Manchester United.
Tom, wohoo, first comment after reading your site (many times!) daily for probably a year or so now. Your site is great - there's always a good read and it's never mindless junk like many other sites.
Keep doing your own thing, that's what people come here for!
→ Posted by: Chris Harris at June 25, 2003 9:23 AM
As for me this is one of the few weblogs i've stuck with over the years simply because it covers anything and everything. If there is a post that doesn't interest me then I simply skip it and go onto the next site (this is so obvious that it barely needs mentioning).
As for the validity of the code in the previous post - I don't use MT but I do have 10 years+ experience in perl, php, C++ etc and the code looks fine to me.
Keep writing what the hell you like.
→ Posted by: shaky at June 25, 2003 9:59 AM
I couldn't agree more with your post. And having read the deludedly self-important and crass drivel which prompted it, I thought I'd add my voice to the others who agree with you.
Also, I've just made your "random link button" for which hack I am extremely grateful.
→ Posted by: qB at June 25, 2003 3:07 PM
dude, i think you should write about more cool stuff and less about stuff that's like, not cool. that would like, totally rock!
→ Posted by: mikey at June 25, 2003 3:49 PM
I'm with Shaky on this one. I like your site a lot Tom. Not everything you write about interests me, but the ability to skip articles has never been an issue for me...unlike some people it seems. I tried out MT because of your site and when I decided I liked it, I was well aware of the support forums. However, it is still nice to find out about odd bits and pieces from people like yourself, especially when they relate to things I wouldn't even have thought about and if I did, I'd have the MT forums to wade through...out of the two, reading your site is more fun. Thanks!
→ Posted by: s3d at June 25, 2003 4:57 PM
heh! that last paragraph has to be up there in the list of all-time-great physical threats, along with the one about kicking someone's teeth so far down his/her throat that s/he will need a toilet brush to clean them.
rock on!
→ Posted by: andrew at June 26, 2003 2:38 AM
I haven't fully thought this one through yet so I'm not sure if I actually think it or I just think I think it, but the attraction for me of weblogs is not so much what is said but how it's said. It's the authors voice, their themness that keeps me coming back, whether they're telling me about their new undies or the state of the economy. If people write what they think, or are told, people want to hear instead of what they want to write then their themness disappears and they become just another media outlet. I don't want any of the people in my life (and blog people are part of my life) to be what I want them to be rather than what they are. I'd be all stunted and deformed and ultimately excruciatingly bored if they were.
→ Posted by: Sarah at June 26, 2003 9:29 AM
*Applause*
Well said, Tom. Personally, I prefer to read other people's posts/thoughts, rather than something that's been tweaked and edited to fit in with some nebulous "audience"'s ideas of what you should be, or what should be on the site.
A credo my father used to use all the time was "I may not like what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it". I picked it up somewhere along the line (repetition being the wonderful learning tool it is) and I pretty much stick to that now.
All power to your quill/pen/keyboard, and nil illegitimi carborundum. *Grin*
→ Posted by: Lyle at June 26, 2003 1:12 PM
Huzzah...
I came up against this very problem with my own...and decided to chuck it and start over. My "brand" was too well-defined to start changing the tone and subjects as dramatically as I would like to, so I broke up with my blog...and wrote a ridiculously long essay to explain why.
While I wish at the moment I had followed the momentum started by Mark and now your force added, nonetheless I think it just would have been too difficult to make the adjustment. Then again, while neither of you are doing much differently than you have been (and I, for one, enjoy and appreciate it), I just think it may be that readers are beginning to get a sense of entitlement that is more familiar to authors who write a series of books that are similar in tone and content, building expectations, and then upon writing something different, well, readers think they have every right in the world to tell you how much (and how hard) you suck.
→ Posted by: Liz at June 26, 2003 5:15 PM
The only way people can shut you up is if you hand them the censorship duct tape yourself. Don't let anyone tell you what to write.
→ Posted by: Sheila at June 28, 2003 5:59 AM
>>But I swear to god, the next person who tries to tell me what I should and shouldn't be writing on my own site - which I produce for free and for which I ask nothing in exchange - is going to get a kick up the arse so fucking hard that when they finally land again they'll have frost in their hair...
→ Posted by: Holly at June 28, 2003 1:11 PM
"But I swear to god, the next person who tries to tell me what I should and shouldn't be writing on my own site - which I produce for free and for which I ask nothing in exchange - is going to get a kick up the arse so fucking hard that when they finally land again they'll have frost in their hair..." That's such a fine, fine sentiment I'm tempted to use it as my new sig. Go, Tom! (And sorry about the error in the previous comment.)
→ Posted by: Holly at June 28, 2003 1:13 PM
Amen, Tom. This is absolutely the correct attitude. Don't let the bastards drag you down.
→ Posted by: Cory Doctorow at June 30, 2003 11:47 PM