What exactly is a blog supposed to win? Seth Godin says, “Blogs with restraint, selectivity, cogency and brevity (okay, that’s a long way of saying “making every word count”) will use attention more efficiently and ought to win.”

I guess because Seth is a creative, successful and sought-after author/speaker/marketing guru, he sees blogging through another prism than I see blogging. For example, I don’t understand exactly what is the competition that showing restraint, etc., is supposed to help a blogger win?

I’ll go back to my telephone metaphor. Having a blog is like having a telephone. It merely gives one the ability to connect to a network: a voice in a conversation. Using all the A-List, best-seller, share-of-market, loyalty-of-readership metaphors is perhaps appropriate if one views their weblog as part of some sort of marketing plan.

Perhaps if one views a blog as part of an ad campaign-like strategy, one can win or lose something by blogging “wrong.” If one sees blogging as a competition, I guess one can win — or lose.

If that’s the case, I guess you can see more bloggers blogging (in Seth’s words), as “a noisy tragedy.” (A tragedy? Is someone dying here? Is having people remove you from their RSS feed because you’re blogging too much a tragedy? I guess Seth’s threshold of tragedy is a bit lower than mine.)

So, I’ll go back to my first rule of blogging: There are no rules.

If you want to blog without restraint, have at it. Be random. Be irrelevant. Be Tolstoyan (or, Jarvisian) and say in 30 words what you could in three.

And while you’re at it, be young, be foolish, but be happy.

Worrying about “winning” at blogging is the real tragedy.

Update: Scott Karp: “As for Seth, well, that was so 1.0.”

Technorati Tags: blogging

sxsw interactive podcasts: While just a few of the gazillion sessions taking place are posted, here’s a link to audio files of sxsw presentations. And, there’s an RSS feed and thus, they are podcasting. (via: LifeHacker.com)

Technorati Tags: sxsw

Pray for Charlotte: I believe in the power of loving and caring and, indeed, praying. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than respond to a request by her parents that I pray for a beautiful little girl in Nashville named Charlotte.

Update: link fixed.

Better than meeting Brad Pitt’s cousin: While my celebrity sightings at sxsw interactive have been limited to those whose fame is primarily in the blogosphere (where everyone is famous for 15 people), I just saw on my rss feed of Flickr photos tagged SXSW that Adams Keys saw a real, live celebrity, Owen Wilson, at what’s becoming my “regular” restaurant.

Update: My blogger and real-life friend BB Logan back in Nashville has “a friend” (making this a true friend-of-a-friend story) who can top this celebrity sighting — Keith and Nicole at the Green Hills Starbucks this morning.)

Update 2: Geez, they were eating out a lot today. (via Brittney at Nashville is Talking, who says South Street is a really crappy restaurant.

Technorati Tags: sxsw

Say it ain’t so, Dave: Interesting online conversations going on about Dave retiring his weblog, Scripting.com. As it’s considered “the first” weblog, such an announcement is major blogospheric news. I think there’s a good chance Dave will read this, so I’d like to put in my vote for “No you can’t.”

Perhaps you can stop blogging and archive all of the things you’ve posted on Scripting.com, but you can’t give up having a voice in the conversation. How can you quit that?

Perhaps it’s precisely because I don’t view my weblog as a “publication,” rather as a place to talk and share, I can’t conceive a blog like rexblog.com “ending.” I guess I sorta thought of Scripting.com in the same way.

Yesterday, Heather Armstrong (in a comment I didn’t include in my notes) said she’d stopped blogging for six months because she didn’t like the person she’d become on her blog. Obviously, she got over it.

Perhaps a “sabbatical” is what you need.

Technorati Tags: blogging, davewiner

Craig Newmark endorses custom publishing (sorta): I feel certain I’m the only person among the thousands who are listening to a Q&A “keynote” with Craig Newmark of Craigslist.com who thinks his comment about a customer magazine is the most significant comment in his remarks. (For those who may wonder why: Publishing customer/member magazines is what I do.)

Someone in the audience tells him how they’re proud of him being on the cover of the customer magazine Costco Connection because “my mother reads it.” Craig says they’ve received more mail about the story in Costco Connection than just about any other media attention they’ve received.

For the record, Costco Connection is a customer magazine.

Technorati Tags: craigslist, sxsw

Dave Winer is going to stop blogging: Dave says he’s going to stop blogging. “Probably before the end of 2006, I will put this site in mothballs, in archive mode, and go on to other things, Murphy-willing of course….”Blogging doesn’t need me anymore. It’ll go on just as well, maybe even better, with some new space opened up for some new things. But more important to me, there will be new space for me. Blogging not only takes a lot of time (which I don’t begrudge it, I love writing) but it also limits what I can do, because it’s made me a public figure. I want some privacy, I want to matter less, so I can retool, and matter more, in different ways. What those ways are, however, are things I won’t be talking about here. That’s the point. That’s the big reason why.”

Wait, is this April 1?

Technorati Tags: davewiner, rss