Tales of the hackneyed demagogue
I just took a look at my Finnish-language blog "Lovelacen testi",
which I ran for two years but haven't really posted anything this year,
and don't much intend to. (The blog is named after a variant of the
famous Turing test,
and this variant itself was named after the famous early computer
programmer.) Even so, I noticed from its SiteMeter page that it still
gets a couple hundred visitors each day, which is actually a pretty
impressive number in the small and cozy Finnish blogosphere.
My Finnish blog evolved to serve three purposes. First, I used it to write some small general sociopolitical essays, the same way as I continue to do in this blog. Second, I used this blog to illustrate aspects of life here for my Finnish readers, in some "American Uncle" style. This purpose is of course moot in this blog, since everybody reading this on this side of Atlantic already knows better than me what life if like here. Third, I posted articles about books I read and movies I saw and recommended, along with links to good sites, blogs and individual articles that I had discovered, thereby creating a bridge from the Finnish blogosphere to the greater North American one. Many times some English-language blog experienced a little "ilkkalanche" bringing it a noticable number of Finnish readers, wondering where these people came from! This is probably why my Finnish blog still keeps getting daily hits, when Finns keep going through its archives looking for good stuff to read. I occasionally do the same thing myself, going back to good stuff that I had forgotten even exists.
The Finnish blogosphere is so small that there can really be one list in which every blog can and usually will register to gain readers and get to measure its relative popularity. The popularity rankings of this list and its predecessor are considered pretty authoritative. At my peak, I believe I was ranked the fifth or so overall, but for the last few months I have been ranked around thirtieth or so, slowly falling down.
I used to read the American blogosphere for a long time before I came to notice the similar services offered by places such as TTLB and Technorati. When I first looked at the TTLB Ecosystem list of top blogs, I was surprised that I was already familiar with all the top blogs there. That was surprising, since what are the odds of this happening in a blogosphere consisting of hundreds of thousands of blogs, of which I will ever see only a microscopically small portion? But then I remembered Clay Shirky's often-quoted article "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality" that explains that since a site getting linked to is a seriously positive feedback phenomenon, pretty soon all roads lead to Rome and one simply can't avoid constantly encountering the top-ranked blogs, even without the aid of any explicit list.
It is interesting to compare the list of top blogs in both the TTLB Ecosystem and the Finnish Blogilista. One cultural difference is immediately obvious: pretty much every single top-ranked blog in TTLB is explicitly political (for example, in the top 10 list right now, only Boing Boing is nonpolitical) whereas in Blogilista, the first blog that is even remotely political instead of concentrating on the everyday life and general views of its proprietor, the blog of the Finnish MP Jyrki Kasvi, is currently ranked only the 25th. There really are no significant political blogs that would be general blogs in style of, say, Instapundit or Kos, but all political blogs are some politicians nonoffensive lists of "people I met and things I did today" and "some social issues that I care about".
But speaking of politics, a few years ago when Finland had the parliamentary elections, I noticed how away from the national mainstream thinking the Finnish blogosphere is. You see, in the parliamentary politics, the three largest parties are the Social Democrats, National Coalition and the Center Party, in some order, and together these three collect the vast majority of votes. But it sure was hard finding even one Finnish blog whose proprietor admitted voting for one of these parties! If you had sampled the Finnish blogosphere, the gorilla-like winners of those elections would have been the Green League and the Leftist Alliance, which in reality together comprise perhaps 15% of the political pie. (I even spotted some people wondering how it is possible that the Greens don't get more votes, since everybody that they know supports them. Some aspects of ignorance seem to be truly universal.)
My Finnish blog evolved to serve three purposes. First, I used it to write some small general sociopolitical essays, the same way as I continue to do in this blog. Second, I used this blog to illustrate aspects of life here for my Finnish readers, in some "American Uncle" style. This purpose is of course moot in this blog, since everybody reading this on this side of Atlantic already knows better than me what life if like here. Third, I posted articles about books I read and movies I saw and recommended, along with links to good sites, blogs and individual articles that I had discovered, thereby creating a bridge from the Finnish blogosphere to the greater North American one. Many times some English-language blog experienced a little "ilkkalanche" bringing it a noticable number of Finnish readers, wondering where these people came from! This is probably why my Finnish blog still keeps getting daily hits, when Finns keep going through its archives looking for good stuff to read. I occasionally do the same thing myself, going back to good stuff that I had forgotten even exists.
The Finnish blogosphere is so small that there can really be one list in which every blog can and usually will register to gain readers and get to measure its relative popularity. The popularity rankings of this list and its predecessor are considered pretty authoritative. At my peak, I believe I was ranked the fifth or so overall, but for the last few months I have been ranked around thirtieth or so, slowly falling down.
I used to read the American blogosphere for a long time before I came to notice the similar services offered by places such as TTLB and Technorati. When I first looked at the TTLB Ecosystem list of top blogs, I was surprised that I was already familiar with all the top blogs there. That was surprising, since what are the odds of this happening in a blogosphere consisting of hundreds of thousands of blogs, of which I will ever see only a microscopically small portion? But then I remembered Clay Shirky's often-quoted article "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality" that explains that since a site getting linked to is a seriously positive feedback phenomenon, pretty soon all roads lead to Rome and one simply can't avoid constantly encountering the top-ranked blogs, even without the aid of any explicit list.
It is interesting to compare the list of top blogs in both the TTLB Ecosystem and the Finnish Blogilista. One cultural difference is immediately obvious: pretty much every single top-ranked blog in TTLB is explicitly political (for example, in the top 10 list right now, only Boing Boing is nonpolitical) whereas in Blogilista, the first blog that is even remotely political instead of concentrating on the everyday life and general views of its proprietor, the blog of the Finnish MP Jyrki Kasvi, is currently ranked only the 25th. There really are no significant political blogs that would be general blogs in style of, say, Instapundit or Kos, but all political blogs are some politicians nonoffensive lists of "people I met and things I did today" and "some social issues that I care about".
But speaking of politics, a few years ago when Finland had the parliamentary elections, I noticed how away from the national mainstream thinking the Finnish blogosphere is. You see, in the parliamentary politics, the three largest parties are the Social Democrats, National Coalition and the Center Party, in some order, and together these three collect the vast majority of votes. But it sure was hard finding even one Finnish blog whose proprietor admitted voting for one of these parties! If you had sampled the Finnish blogosphere, the gorilla-like winners of those elections would have been the Green League and the Leftist Alliance, which in reality together comprise perhaps 15% of the political pie. (I even spotted some people wondering how it is possible that the Greens don't get more votes, since everybody that they know supports them. Some aspects of ignorance seem to be truly universal.)
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