Reviews, Blogdex, Bloggies, Anti-Bloggies - the rant of Peter at Naked Blog is self-censored, in the best traditions of the free press, but he didn't manage to do that before I had started to think about quality, popularity and ambition.

I have never installed a hit-counter on this blog. I don't have comments here. This blog doesn't stick at blogdex, probably the bug Cameron Marlow discovered when he tried to see if his own blog made blogdex and found that it didn't. I didn't know until recently what the A-list was, so it doesn't bother me that it's impossible to get on the A-list for those of us not born to it. I don't know if these measures of popularity makes my writing better or worse. What I keep thinking of is that all these ways of measuring and displaying popularity (I am not talking quality, the aesthetics of blogging are at the moment way behind the documentation of the social capital to be gained by blogging) is a new expression of the net as a social arena. It's the domain of the amateurs, the lovers of silly buttons and fancy graphics, the fans of romantic short stories and sticker long stories, the hunters and gatherers of erotic and not so erotic descriptions of a fanciful selection of sexual positions.

Is this a bad thing? Why should it be? The net is about to become something other than the playground of academics and a gallery of nerdiness and cultural arrogance. I still don't have to adapt to more than what I like to, even if I might be a fairly early adaptor at the areas I am interested in.