On Importance

More evidence surfaced today that a.) what I'm doing right now (i.e. blogging) is Very Important, but b.) my particular instance of this worthy activity is Not Very Important. I remain a remote vertex on the far fringes of the blogoverse's vast directed graph, with my indegree stuck resolutely at zero.

Here are a couple of news stories from much closer to the center of the graph, pointing at what we're told are hip, happening bits of the blogosphere, directly from various stodgy corners of the Old Media. Because if anyone knows what's hip and happening at this very moment, it's the Old Media. Everybody knows that.

The BBC would like us to know all about something called the Blooker Prize, by analogy with the UK's "old media" Booker Prize. Soon, the world's best blog will be anointed, and the author given a golden opportunity to leap to the world of dead trees and lead-based ink. Yay!

Closer to home, Portland's own Willamette Week has a trend/style article that puts local bloggers on notice: You're nobody, unless your blog's hosted on UrbanHonking. If you (like me) use Blogspot or some other service, you're a hopeless square. If you aren't l33t enough to have a blog on UH, you might as well give up on the whole internet thing and go back to making buggy whips. I'd actually never even heard of the thing before, but then I also have a huge amount of trouble keeping up on the local indie rock scene, too. Which is too bad, because you can't possibly be cool in this town unless you can list from memory at least 3 dozen bands nobody else on the planet has ever heard of. And they all have to be exactly the right sort of band, too. No country-western, no hair metal, no 60's style soul music. Just 100% pure indie rock, and lots of it. Yay. And while I'm at it, stop calling me "Gramps", dammit.

And then, there's the matter of Wal-Mart recruiting friendly bloggers to help polish their image. It's surprising how many Wal-Mart-friendly bloggers there are out there. Apparently a large chunk of the conservative (and/or venal money-grubbing) blogosphere genuinely belives that Wal-Mart's "red state" image is a real expression of ideology on the company's part, and is absolutely not a coldly calculated marketing campaign like what Target's managed on the "blue state" side of things. Whew. Talk about naive.

The really important point here is that, to date, not a single "old media" type has pretended to fawn over my every word, and not one corporate flack has, so far, dangled schwag in front of me in exchange for my considerable literary services. It's quite the crying shame, although I remain convinced they're all doing it just to make me jealous.