To a friend, whom I have lately encouraged to blog
In response to your missive of May 8th, in which you lament: “Most blogs to me, seem to just be splogs. Logs of spewed thoughts. Just stuff, and most-often not well-considered… [S]orting through spew to get at the meaningful thought is a burden I neither want to get into, not participate in by adding to it.”
________________________
Sure, there’s a lot of spew in the blogosphere. But find me a place where the quality:crap ratio is better than 5% these days. You filter out the crap and you add quality. On your terms, at your pace. The medium serves you, not the other way around.
The fact is that your current site is a blog. It is not one that publishes frequently, and it comes at things from an odd angle. Right – like any number of sites on LJ. At some level I’m suggesting it as a management tool, and I speak as somebody who has explored a number of ways of managing my own content and brand.
But hey, nobody got no guns to your head, and if the set-up you have now serves you happily, that’s fine with me.
I would only argue one final point. About the “spew ratio” above. When we’re thinking about excessively negative signal:noise ratios we tend to focus on the noise end of the equation. The distraction, the junk, the dissonance, the inanity, the stupidity in the channel, etc. As that number rises, the S:N ratio decreases. So we talk about how we could decrease the static in the channel.
However, the other problem, the one we don’t talk about, is the dearth of signal. The other way you improve the S:N ratio is by increasing the quality, pumping more meaningful content through the channel, etc.
You know what it’s like to have a brilliant introvert kid in class – one who knows more than any other student, but who keeps it to himself. It gripes you, because as a teacher, you inherently value the act of sharing knowledge and insight. It’s who you are. So if you’re like me, there’s a part of you that feels like that kid is cheating you and his classmates by keeping his wisdom secret – by hiding his light under a bushel, as it were.
From a mathematical perspective, the signal to noise ratio is as compromised by the silent genius as it is by the braying jackass.
Just a thought….
lullaby pit 
Problem is, a lot of people think they are silent geniuses.
Most of them are wrong.
A study a couple years ago demonstrated that stupid people don’t know they’re stupid. That has to be related somehow….
Someone should draw a Venn Diagram 😀
Yup: either decreasing the signal or increasing the noise is doing no good.
On the other hand, silent geniuses are welcome to stay silent, IMHO. There’s the old adage “better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool then open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
🙂
That just increases the net number of fools.
this is the digital world. there is no noise. there are only idiots who scream loud enough to turn the zeroes into ones and geniuses quiet enough to let their ones become zeroes.
we don’t need better content. we need better dithering filters.
Whoever develops an app that can detect and auto-delete stupidity is bound to make… err, like dozens of dollars? How bad would that be? An idiot who doesn’t know he’s an idiot installs a stupid filter on his computer and it immediately deletes all his e-mail and erases his hard drive…..