EDIT: who’s saying it and where it’s being said BOTH matter.

I’m also iffy about the conceptualization of readers “swimming randomly” (and the “blog stabilizing them” part again emphasizes blog over author!). Swimming where and how? And what “ethereal readership?” If there is nothing to read (again, communication is necessary for being), how can a readership be said to exist?

So the blogs subsuming of the author in single-author blogs is inevitable. As I said here, in the ’sphere, existence is predicated upon communication, not vice versa. So it’s unavoidable that a connection be established between an author and the content for his/her posts – unless they don’t have a blog, and, well, that’s impossible.

But I had recently realized that blogs don’t exist. If OH suddenly went down, do you think anything would happen? Each blogger would just go back to their home blogs. What substantiates the existence of bloggers is their readership. If THAT went down, a fair number of bloggers would be homeless, but they would still exist in the minds of the readership, but this ethereal readership would not be centered nor anchored around a stable, communicative base, the blog.

The readership is kind of like a school of fish, swimming around randomly, and the blog is a fishing net that stabilizes the fish’s movement and orders it in a “visible” shape.

And as per this post, the visible real estate of blogs is what constitutes most of the ’sphere (archives and memory would be the meat of the ’sphere).

Posting at over 9000 blogs is just an attempt to catalyze traffic flows. That’s why I link to the post before that, to throw down a visible fishing line that these fish can track, creating a path that aligns my disparate nexistence. Of course, traffic itself means nothing, and hopefully people frequent the blogs I post at because of other authors, or something. Then there’s this.

Yeah, anitations is surely grounding my identity. Not like that’s a problem, I think. I never think of the bloggers-in-observance when I read ani-nouto. It’s just author, author, author.

@CJ: whore.

@Baka-Raptor: thanks for the link, will check out.

@jpmeyer:

There are so many aspects of the blog format (everything from RSS feed setup to blog theme formatting to feed settings, SEO, etc.) that subtly subsume the writer to the blog itself.

That’s all the result of habit. Blogs can be more about the author(s) and less about the blog; it’s just a matter of designing things to be differently focused.

Why post at one of the over 9000 blogs you post at over another unless they are all indistinguishable?

It is because they are different than people would post at different sites, right? Like, ghostlightning posted about his pedophilia on this site, not WRL.

Now that I think about it, I see it as neither true for blogs nor for other forms of writing like say, scholarly journals. Then again, the problem arises more from a failure of focus or branding. Why post at one of the over 9000 blogs you post at over another unless they are all indistinguishable?

(Also, I see metablogging as the ultimate subsuming of author to blog, although I am looking at the author of the metablog rather than the author of the blogs being blogged about. Perhaps the supreme irony here is that anitations is the one blog that I most strongly associate with lelangir.)