Who to invite to the party....

It occurred to me as I was setting up this blog thingy that we use and propagate the Internet almost as much to exclude people as we do to include them. I love writing, so blogging was inevitable, and I'm a web marketer by profession so it makes sense that I'd want to get this out to as many people as possible. Eager to accommodate me, Typepad lets me syndicate this to whomever wants it, and I can pass new posts to all sorts of feeds automatically. Look at me now, a shining point of light among the 14+ million blogs out there today, open and accessible to all, a veritable public library of discourse (albeit with only one book available at the moment).

But who do I really want reading this? Messrs. Scoble, Lessig, Kottke, and my Santa Barbara homeboy Searls are, of course, hereby personally invited to read at their leisure. My friends, colleagues and family are also most welcome to check this blog out, if for no other reason than to see a local boy make good by publicly posting sentences with proper subject-predicate agreement. I'd even like to open up the floodgates to virtually any other interested rubberneckers in the blogosphere, whatever their reason may be for stopping by.

At some point, though, this A, B and C list ends, and I wonder if I will pine for a large, heavily tattooed e-bouncer to close off the proverbial e-velvet-rope and thereby deny entrance to any e-riffraff who simply have no good reason to be at the party. The good people at TypePad, after all, have anticipated this and offered me the ability to block offending IP addresses, bless their hearts. In my year or so of blogging experience, I've already used this feature once in my wedding blog, when an entrepreneurial soul tried to get me to visit his online tuxedo accessory store. My wedding blog was for family, friends, and kindred spirits- not for salespeople, so I locked him out. I wonder if any people on this list ever block out e-riffraff?

One is starting to see this sense of selective membership crop up. I've just started playing around with LinkedIn (I know, I'm behind the times here), one of a dozen or so social networking sites that connects you through X degrees of separation to people you'd theoretically get on with. Here, the very benefit provided is excluding anyone outside a known, trustworthy web of resources, much like you might pick sides for dodgeball in 4th grade gym class based entirely on the recommendations of the jocks in your class. So long as you trust your friends to get your back, you never need worry about accidentally choosing for your team the equivalent of the prototypical head-geared spaz who, overcome by a Phys-Ed inspired St. Vitus-like panic, consistently throws his own teammates out accidentally whenever he touches the ball. Or something like that.

I find the massive adoption of these arguably reactionary pushes towards cliquishness or exclusivity on the Web very interesting in an industry that concurrently espouses the opening up of all information as its best and only hope for a bright future.

At any rate, welcome to you all (for now).

Comments

[Melanie]

WHat you have to say about blogging and the social implications are very interesting... but I wonder if the knowledge that anyone could read what you write (especially friends that you might write about)effects the content of your blog. Do you blog for the fun or do you blog as a cathartic experiance similar to writing in a diary? Im curious because i am working on a paper about the differences between print and web writing and how the availabilty of the web changes both content and participants.