blogger interrupted

One of the biggest turnoffs of the blogosphere, to me, is all the handwringers taking themselves WAY too seriously, but it’s so mjuch worse when it’s combined with judgmental hypocrisy.

A manifestation can be seen here, in this week’s Carnival of Ohio politics, also known as exercise in futility that delivered me two links today. Jill trumpets a “serious call for comments”. Pho wants to police it.

We’d like a little community input into whether we should stiffen our policing of the format.

And then there’s the high-minded Photasticness in the comments at the Carnival itself, where we learn it is actually “owned”.

It’s dewey-eyed and idealistic to think of the Carnival as a community public forum rather than a property the four of us own, and your prickly response confirms that.

Dewey-eyed and idealistic?  Are you kidding me?  I didn’t know that anyone “owned” this Carnival thingie.  It’s pretty much a vanity project, a fairly useless one at that, whose best value is as a cheap marketing tool for new blogs like mine who need the 2 clicks.  But hey, ownership has its priveleges, I guess, so go ahead Pho, own it.

What is Pho’s little piss fit really about?  A response to some nonpolitical iPhone post?   Of course not.  It’s a response to me sending Pho (who edited his “property” this week) a couple of posts he doesn’t particularly like.  

And do we run the risk of another blogger submitting a post that is simply self-promotion based on the precedent. Tim Russo’s Part 1 of his history with George Nemeth is about Meet the Bloggers, certainly an important development on the 2006 political landscape. But it similarly makes me nervous, not least because I suspect Part 2 doesn’t end well.

Whatever “simple self-promotion” my submission to this laughable exercise may be, it pales in comparison to sending out a weekly email, for more than 2 years, asking everyone else in the blogosphere for their free content, which you will then pass judgment upon, edit, cut and paste, and post on something you claim to “own”.  

The number of blatantly self-promoting emails I get on a weekly basis from the “owners” of this 113th Carnival number many, many times 113.  I even tried to get my email address off this list for A YEAR while I was not blogging, but still the emails came.  When I finally sent a post for Bridget’s new blog, Jill wondered why I was so interested, when I asked to get off the list, which I never actually got off of.

Whatever community building role this Carnival fulfills, if it disappears completely today, or implodes as a result of a blogger ethics panel convened in Carnival HQ, or if the bloggers who provide free content to its owners decide to stop doing so, I suspect not one person will miss it for 113 seconds.  It’s biggest splash will probably be from this post I am writing right now.  

I hereby ask, AGAIN, to be taken off of the Carnival email list.  I don’t know if you guys ever figured out the vagueries of email address books, but now is the time.

Thanks.

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