Okay, so let's start from the very beginning, for those who need to start from the very beginning...

There's this website called Technorati, see? And at its heart, Technorati is nothing more than a search engine, just like Google; but in this case specifically for blogs and nothing else. And sure, there are lots of places out there trying to track what's being said just in the blogosphere (including Google themselves); but what makes Technorati so popular is that its owners are really, really obsessed with making their results as accurate, reliable and quick as humanly possible. So, for example, Technorati has been in the forefront of new algorithims for filtering out spam blogs, or "splogs;" they've been in the forefront of new ways for search engines to gather information in the first place; they're one of the main sponsors of an annual tech convention devoted to new ways of fighting spam, etc. And as a result, Technorati really does have this incredibly reliable and accurate database of blog information, updated at this amazing rate, which has built the trust of millions of users, which is why everyone now seems to turn to Technorati for finding out the latest about the blogosphere.

And Technorati knows this, see; in fact, that's the whole point, and why they're spending all this time and money achieving such a thing. And so they're always putting tools into place at their site that exploit this accuracy as well, and make it even easier and more powerful to get just the information you're looking for, in a whole variety of ways. (Technorati, for example, was one of the very first places to marry a search result to a unique RSS feed, something almost every search engine now does.) And this convinces yet more people to use Technorati, which makes Technorati more popular, which convinces yet more people to use Technorati. One of the things, though, that I think is most interesting about what they do with all this information, is that Dave Sifri, Technorati's owner, publishes a detailed report three or four times a year, explaining what all their latest data is showing them. He calls it "The State of the Blogosphere," and it's literally one of the most fascinating things on the web I get to read regularly; and it's so fascinating, of course, because since their information is so much more accurate than anyone else's, they're learning shocking new facts all the time that no one had even guessed at before.

Sifri's latest report, for example, just came out, and it too holds a whole wealth of surprises in it, which has been getting bloggers around the world crowing about "A-list" this and "Z-list" that and "brrreeeport" something-or-other this week. In Part 1, Sifri basically confirms that Technorati now believes there to be approximately 27 million unique, real blogs in existence now; that the blogosphere continues to double about every six months; that almost 3 million of these blogs are updated at least once a week; that roughly 10 percent of all new blogs being created today are splogs; that they're tracking approximately one million new blog posts a day, about half of them containing tags now as well; and that the vast, vast majority of incoming links and readers are going towards the same teeny little top tier of popular blogs, with the other 27 million having hardly any readers at all. And that's what's been getting so many bloggers crowing this week, is the whole idea of an A-list and Z-list appearing in the blogosphere; that you're either BoingBoing and literally have an audience that's now a third of the size of the New York Times itself, or you're just one of 27 million schmucks who no one actually reads or listens to.

Much more intriguing, though, at least in my opinion, is what Sifri spells out in part 2 of the report; because in a nutshell, he says that these numbers are deceiving, and that we all need to be thinking of a radically different way of measuring the 'success' of specific bloggers. What he does, in fact, is coin an entirely new phrase, based off Chris Anderson's now-infamous theory about the "big head" and "long tail" of the new economy (which can be directly compared to the 'A-list' and 'Z-list'); he's created the "magic middle," which Technorati defines as any blogger who currently has between 20 and 1,000 people linking to them in their database. I'm part of the magic middle, actually, and I'm sure so are a number of my readers; there are, in fact, around 150,000 of us altogether around the world, out of the 27 million blogs Technorati now tracks, out of the 3 million of them that are currently updating at least once a week. And here's the surprising thing that Technorati learned, by tracking which actual links people clicked after doing searches; that when it comes to niche subjects - dieting, athletics, cars, the arts, publishing, open-source software, etc - the general public is turning to the magic middle in profoundly larger numbers than they are the A-listers, or even the mainstream media.

People, are you listening to this? This is what I've been trying to say for years. I'm extremely happy, for example, with the readership I have here; but I admit that it doesn't hold a candle to some of the powerhouse bloggers out there, nor will it probably ever, nor would I even want it to. I like the fact that I seem to have built some level of trust with the readers I do have; that a lot of you are willing to take my opinions seriously, actually try the things I recommend, sometimes actually change things I complain about. My site, I feel, is less about the Rolling Stones trying to fill Soldier Field, and more about playing this extremely fun game of "Six Degrees of Separation" at a cocktail party. I may not have every employee of a hi-tech company reading my journal; but I might have the one exact person who's in a position to change the thing I might want changed. And in that case the thing still gets changed, and I as an individual was still able to have that kind of power, to literally change something at that hi-tech company I didn't like, without me having to have a gazillion readers or be written up in Wired or whatever. And that, for example, is why I don't bother keeping close track of my visitor statistics, because I don't think raw numbers reflect at all what the real power is of my journal. (And besides, this journal is available in so many different ways, the stats would never be accurate in the first place; a big majority of you, for example, are still reading through AvantGo, which only shows up as one hit at my main website each day, while those who read through the feeds don't show up as any hits at all.)

This has been a great, great thing about my journal, probably the most rewarding thing of all about maintaining it. And what's so exciting about Sifri's report, I think, is that it proves how easy it is for any blogger out there to be in this kind of position as well; after all, it only takes 20 links at Technorati to become part of the magic middle. And fuck, anybody who posts at least one intriguing thought per day, for days and days in a row, can generate 20 links at Technorati. And once you're in that magic middle, you suddenly have the opportunity to do exactly what I've done here at my journal; to build an incredibly intelligent audience, who will actually listen to what you have to say, and sometimes enact some of the changes you propose. You get to sway opinions, and you get to change minds. You get to have fans who are in random positions of authority, in a random series of industries. And to me, that's the really exciting thing about being a blogger, and why I continue doing it; not whether I get nominated for a Webby, or get made fun of in Valleywag, or make the "Technorati 100" or whatever.

I think Sifri's really hit the nail on the head here, regarding what's so fun and exciting about the blogosphere in the first place; it's not about building another NYT, but rather having a whole diverse variety of writers and publications to listen to, each of them on their own a much better expert than anything the mainstream media could produce, even though none of them have much of an audience on their own. I really hope that more people will start to look at the blogosphere in this way as well, and realize that it's less about creating rock stars and more about creating a conversation. That all of us have a chance to be a part of this conversation, too, and on certain days maybe flare up into that A-list category, before quickly dying back down into our magic middle again. It's a much better, and certainly much less frustrating, way to think about blogging in general, and specifically the blog you yourself might be currently maintaining.

So speaking of the mainstream media: I'm now even one step closer to not needing a paper news publication in my life ever again. I've talked about this many times before, of course, how in the last year because of my mobile device I've been quickly changing the way I even receive and read news now, with first world and then national and now even local items being delivered to me much more efficiently via RSS, for free, in a way that I can read at home or take on the go, and be able to save interesting articles with one click of a mouse or one tap of a stylus. Even with that, though, paper publications still tended to be an easier choice for me when it came to the small comfort items of journalism, often buried in an "entertainment" or "metro" section: comics, that is, horoscope, advice columns, quote of the day and the like. Ah, but now that I have a home internet connection, I've been screwing around some with the cool-ass interactive widgets that you can place on your "MyGoogle" personalized home page. And I've found widgets now that cover just about everything I was still checking the newspaper for anymore; even a widget that will pump my favorite comics into my home page and let me toggle between them. And unlike a desktop widget, these reside on a web page; so I can pull them up on my mobile device, for example, when I'm out and about, or from other people's desktops when I'm out of town, etc.

So now, really, the only reason I have left anymore to pick up a paper news publication is to do the crossword puzzle; literally, that's it, and am not only now getting the rest of that newspaper's entire content delivered online, but just profoundly more information than that publication alone could've ever offered me in the first place. So, you know, the deathclock has begun, paper news publications. I've just proven it to myself, and more and more people soon are going to start proving it to themselves, too. Let's see if for once in your miserable histories you'll finally be able to recognize this yourselves, or if you're all going to just keep denying it until the point comes where you all get laid off, then spend the next twenty years bitching about how the public "doesn't want journalism anymore." We'll see, I guess.

Could the US's continual torture practices in the Middle East eventually lead to Baghdad becoming the world's new center for intellectual thought? It could if the following science-fictiony type scenario took place:

A coalition of nations, led by the UN and EU, finally just have enough of the US's outrageous human-rights violations around the world. They call for an immediate closure of the US's secret torture facilities, to be turned over for international management, or else risk a catastrophic and total economic boycott by all the nations involved.

The US being what it is, of course, laughs and scoffs at the idea that this coalition could even enact such a radical boycott, much less that it would cause any permanent damage. They refuse to comply.

The coalition enacts the radical boycott. US economy collapses within weeks, before Congress can even agree on how to respond to the situation. Humbled, the administration turns over control of their torture facilities to an international group, who immediately modernize the facilities and re-implement the Geneva Convention.

The damage, however, is too profound; the US, in fact, never completely recovers from the damage done by the boycott. The country still continues to function, and in fact its citizens eventually become much happier, since focus is once again shifted back to domestic issues. It's simply that the US is no longer the world's dominant power, but rather just one of an entire jigsaw of nations again, adding its part to the overall complex world economy.

Europe and Asia, meanwhile, are forced into new business practices because of the boycott, setting up new alliances among non-American countries in a way that didn't exist before. The partnerships stay intact after the boycott, turning these two continents into much more powerful entities than the US could ever hope to again be. UN Headquarters moved to Brussels; it simply seems to everyone to be a better choice now.

Inspired by the post-WWII Marshall Plan, championed by liberal, proactive leaders in Europe, the UN starts sinking billions upon billions of euros into new infrastructure in the Middle East, creating the building blocks of a mature Western-style civilization. Convinced by the early examples of Turkey and Jordan, the international community also is tolerant of what style of Western-type civilization is implemented; unlike the US, who as a superpower called for the superficial, commodity-based capitalism of their own country, this international community encourages the Middle East to develop ways of living that combine their ancient Arabic beliefs with Western-style civil rights.

Creation of a middle class in the Arabic world. A practical death to terrorism as we know it, as millions of potential suicide bombers suddenly have something worth living for. Spurred by this activity, the Arabic world becomes a mecca for the international creative community - writers, artists, entrepreneurs, software developers, musicians and the like. Added with a new emphasis on cutting-edge educational facilities, Baghdad eventually becomes the new center of intellectual thought in the world, a place the rest of the globe turns to for cues on the arts, science, philosophy and the like.

Okay, so all we need now is that threat of a catastrophic boycott by the EU and others. Er, international readers, a little help, please?

(Planning on writing about today's entry at your own blog? Don't forget to add the tag 'jasonpettus' so that my readers and I will see it too! Also don't forget that you can send me an audio comment regarding today's entry as well, by clicking here.)