Last Friday I gave a lecture on ‘The Perceived Freshness Fetish’ at the Stifo@Sandberg Moving Movie Industry Conference organized by Mieke Gerritzen and moderated by Koert van Mensvoort. In my lecture I focused on the changing notion of authorship in blogging as blogs are more and more becoming autonomous units within the network. This network lives on the premise of constant updates and the blogger is caught in this race to keep content fresh.

I do not have a transcript of the actual presentation (which included a few improvised extras) but here are my prepared notes:

Hi, my name is Anne and I’m a blogger and I’m here today to theorize my blogging addiction.

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I look at my blog daily, maybe even several times a day. I don’t visit it to check if it’s still there. I do it because it is part of my daily routine.

My daily ritual starts with checking my e-mail and catching up on reading blog posts of the blogs I’m subscribed to.

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After reading my e-mail and blog subscriptions I used to look at my blog’s statistics, how many people are subscribed to my blog and what my ranking in the blogosphere is.

However, a few months ago I stopped looking at these numbers because just like the stock market they plummeted dramatically (and I will explain why later). It made me depressed.

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I am still addicted to the blog stats that shows where my visitors come from and what they were searching for because they reveal the network my blog is embedded in.

After viewing these stats, I hit Visit Site and go back to my blog.
This is my daily routine which ends with a confrontation with my latest post.

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Blogs posts are traditionally organized in a reversed-chronological order so I am always confronted with my latest post. The postdate immediately catches my eye and it always seems to tell me that it is time to write a new post, that it has been x days since I wrote my last post. It implicitly tells me I have not written for an x number of days. Why do I feel that I need to blog daily?

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There seems to be some kind of norm or consensus in the blogosphere that blogs should be updated daily. Several blogs about blogging recommend posting daily and blog search engines such as Technorati’s & Google rank blogs according to their freshness.

There is both an internal and an external focus on freshness or “perceived freshness fetish” in the blogosphere.

The internal freshness fetish could be described as a wish, a personal demand or a wanting to blog daily.

The external freshness fetish could be described as a requirement by external parties like the blog search engines Google and Technorati to blog daily to achieve a certain ranking.

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This Wired graphic shows what happens with your blog post once you publish it. It visualizes the external technological factors that influence your blog and blogging behavior.

This technological external freshness fetish is imposed by actors in the network that your blog is linked to through the software. Default settings, standard settings, in the popular blogging software such as WordPress make sure that the blogs you link to are automatically notified of this link and is often also received automatically.

On top of that the software notifies the blog search engines that you have updated your blog.

As you can see in the graphic, your blog post starts living a life of it’s own once you have published it. It becomes part of the network.

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These automatic features in the blog software contribute to the dispersion and distribution of blog posts across the blogosphere. They help quickly spread messages in the blogosphere.

The internal and external forces that contribute to the perceived freshness fetish consist of both human (the wish) and technological (the software) factors that have a very subtle and entangled relationship.

The internal drive for freshness (of publishing new blog posts) is a fetish, a fixation. It is something we strive for and when we cannot reach it we feel disappointed and apologize.

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Apologizing to one’s blog audience for a lack of fresh content, for not posting anything new, is quite common in the blogosphere. In 2006 the JLS blog compiled a list of blog excuses under the post title of “Sorry I haven’t posted in a while.” The extensive list is humorous but a closer look reveals that the apologies are uttered towards the readers, the blog audience.

This made me wonder if there are any bloggers who apologize to the blog itself instead of to its readers. This resulted in a post titled “I’m sorry blog excuses” where I noticed a few interesting points after analyzing a number of “I’m sorry blog” blog posts.

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In this clip of the famous blog data mining visualization WeFeelFine you can search the blogosphere for the feelings of bloggers. When selecting abandonment there is a surprising amount of bloggers who do not talk about feeling abandoned themselves but talk about abandoning their blog.

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Here you can see a sample of bloggers apologizing for abandoning their blog. The bloggers who apologized to their blog for not keeping them fresh used a very specific intimate language. The blog posts imply an established intimacy with the blog with references to jealousy, cheating and neglectment.

Most bloggers did not permanently abandon their blog after their “I’m sorry blog” excuse post but some of them did. Their sorry post is the last post they have written and the first post visible when visiting the blog. The blog has become one of the many abandoned blogs out there in the blogosphere and ready to be buried in the graveyard of dead blogs.

But when is a blog dead? Is there a certain threshold for the degree of freshness a blog should maintain? Should we consider a blog inactive or dead six months or a year after its latest post?

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The subtle and entangled relationship between the internal and external factors that constitute and contribute to the freshness fetish have led to the vitalizing of blogs as autonomous entities.

The blogger of course has control over the amount of autonomy a blog has by enabling or disabling the automatic linking features of comments, trackbacks and pingbacks for example. It also controls the “kill switch” (see address not found) of the blog.

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So what’s in store for blogs as autonomous entities within the network? Let’s turn to Japan.

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Blogs aren’t dead, people are.

Reflections on PICNIC by the researchers of the Enquiring Minds seminar.

The PICNIC organization offered 25 researchers a free pass to the conference and asked Digital Methods Initiative researchers Sabine Niederer and Anne Helmond to organize an informal seminar where everyone could meet and present their research to fellow researchers. At the end of the conference they asked the researchers to write a short essay or paper with reflections on the conference or one of the topics in relation to their research.

Thank you to all who participated and we now present you the essays online:

Mapping the Physics of the Web by Esther Weltevrede
Cyberculture, Here and Now by Michael Stevenson
Post-Demographics by Erik Borra
The “Long Now” of PICNIC08 by Andrea Fiore
Formalism and the Real -(time) Social Web @ PICNIC08 by Rachel O’Reilly
Social Gaming: the next big thing? by Pieter-Paul Walraven
Feedback society by Taina Bucher
Open innovation at PICNIC2008 by Thieme Hennis
Reflections on PICNIC by Kjen Wilkens
The Future of Virtual Worlds by Rene Glas
A Picnic Sampler by Sonja Kerkhoff
Let’s disconnect at Picnic by Marije Kanis
PICNIC08 Report by Helene Zuili
Games Go Social by Sonja Utz
Status, Use and Trends of Open Content Models in the New Media Industry by Peter Troxler (podcast)
Reflection on the PICNIC conference by Linda Adrichem
Dutch Extravaganza by David Boardman
PICNIC 2008: Three Days of Miracle and Wonder? by Edward A. Shanken

More info on the PICNIC website.

In February I graduated cum laude with a thesis on blog software and search engines titled ‘Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations.’ It aims to add the study of software-engine relations to the emerging field of Software Studies, which may open up a new avenue in the field by accounting for the increasing entanglement of the engines with software thus further shaping the field.

This thesis wishes to contribute to the understanding of blogs by approaching blogs as both a medium and bi-product of practice that are both entangled in software-engine relations. In the history of blogging both the medium and practice are constantly being shaped by the search and indexing engines. Not only did the introduction of the ‘nofollow’ attribute have a major impact on the construction of the blogosphere, it also points to how the blogger is (un)willingly entangled in a relationship that the blog software establishes with the engines. The common blog practices of tagging, social bookmarking and the obsessive checking of blog statistics raise the question if we are now blogging to feed the engines. Continue to read an excerpt of my PhD proposal to continue my research on software-engine relations, or download the PDF ‘Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations.’ (4,2 Mb)

Excerpt PhD Proposal on Software-Engine Relations

Google as the number one search engine is regarded by many to be “the start page for the Internet” (Dodge, 2007) and “Google has become such a commonly used resource that people are beginning to regard it as synonymous with the Web.” (Searls in Gudrais, 2007). What is missing from the current studies into software is the recognition of the central role that the engines play on the web. The engines are considered to be the starting point of the web and play an important editorial role on the web. Introna and Nissenbaum (2000) describe the politics of search engines with the engines

[...] determining any systematic inclusions and exclusions, the wide-ranging factors that dictate systematic prominence for some sites, dictating systematic invisibility for others. These, we think, are political. They are important because what people (the seekers) are able to find on the Web determines what the Web consists of for them. And we all —individuals and institutions alike— have a great deal at stake in what the Web consists of.

The politics of inclusion and exclusion in the search engines, which may also be described as the drama of search engines (Govcom.org, 2007), is clearly visible in the case of the website 911truth.org which suddenly disappeared from Google results. These issues raise the question if and how the web is structured by search engines. Rogers (2008) describes how the engines are demarcating different spheres on the Web. Previous research done with the Digital Methods Initiative (2007) not only showed how the engines construct different spheres but also how these spheres are constructed differently by different engines.  What role does the software play in the construction of these different spheres?

Previous research into the role of software and the engines in the blogosphere showed that there is an increasing symbiotic relationship between the two (Helmond, 2008). In this study into the most prevailing blog software, WordPress, it appeared that is is establishing strong ties with Google, Google Blog Search and Technorati. The blog software and blog engines determine the nature and construction of the blogosphere through co-construction. These software-engine relations enforce a steady regime in the blogosphere that puts the blogger in a position where the politics of inclusion and exclusion are played out in the game of search engine optimization and spam.

(Excerpt from my PhD proposal)

Why do I feel a need to blog daily? There seems to be some kind of consensus or norm in the blogosphere that blogs should be updated daily. Several blogs about blogging recommend posting daily and blog search engine Technorati’s rankings are correlated to a blog its freshness. There is both an internal and an external “perceived freshness fetish”? (Rogers, 2007) in the blogosphere. The internal freshness fetish could be described as a wish, a personal demand or a wanting to blog daily. The external freshness fetish could be described as a requirement by external parties like Google and Technorati to blog daily to achieve a certain ranking. This external freshness fetish is further imposed by using ping techniques to let services such as Technorati know that you have updated your blog.

This essay deals with the phenomenon of the perceived freshness fetish, the automation of this freshness and the common habit of apologizing for a lack of freshness. I will argue that this freshness fetish is not new to blogs but that it has existed ever since the World Wide Web became popular. The web is often referred to as an open construction which is dynamic, ever expanding and never finished. With the increasing popularity of the Live (dynamic) web we can see the freshness fetish represented in the history of the web in the use of under construction signs, last updated scripts, pinging services, blog apologies and Twitter. This representation in history is not meant as a teleological narrative with Twitter as the ultimate example of the perceived freshness fetish. It rather serves as an illustration of the phenomenon because there is no implicit causal finality in the account of freshness.

Please download PDF to continue reading:
The Perceived Freshness Fetish

Google Earth. De wereld als interface.

The subtitle of Protocol is `How Control Exists After Decentralization´ which is the question Galloway sets out to answer in his book. Previously the issue of control has been dealt with extensively by Foucault and Deleuze. Foucault addressed the central control in sovereign societies of the classical era followed by the decentralized control of the disciplinary societies of the modern era. Deleuze continues where Foucault has left of and states that with the advent of new technologies such as computers we are now living in societies of control. These societies are defined by neither central control nor decentralized control.

Protocol (Alexander Galloway) argument paper