A while back, maybe six months ago, someone sent me a link to the blogger code, at which you answer a few questions about your blogging habit or habits and the site provides you with a relatively unique code that you can place on your site that tells the select few what you think, know, love, and detest about blogging.
It’s a nice experiment. My code is this: B9 d++ t+ k s u f i- o+ x– e- l- c-. Not very elegant; I wish that it would be all d-plusses. (There’s a decoder for this thing as well.)
But in thinking about the logic of the above blogger code, I think that weblogs speak in their own, very specific and more easily decipherable, code. For instance, there is code around all of the following elements that make up blogging:
– The external links you provide on your site is akin to knowing who is in, who you like, who you don’t, and why.
– The type of blogging tool you use has its own classification system — with the list in order of best to worst, though tremendously unspoken, probably being: Movable Type, Greymatter, TypePad, Radio UserLand, Blogger, and Blog*Spot. All kinds of classism goes along with this codification.
– The quantity of posts one does per week. Those who post two or three times per day get extra credits typically.
– The exactitude and quality of the design tells one how interested the blogger is in relaying their sense of the world uniquely.
– The language of the blog, English being the best, of course.
– The uniqueness of the name of the blog and one’s ability to purchase a domain name of unique meaning and origin.
I understand that this sounds all cynical and yucky, but I don’t mean it to. I’m just thinking about the new bloggers on the block, those who don’t have a domain name yet, who don’t know how to install Movable Type (MT), who only know how to type and need an audience. I wonder what they do, how they get in and I wonder if there will increasingly be tools to allow the blog-cream to rise to the misty heavens of a dedicated readership.