What if you had blog editors?
Blog editors? Am I serious? Yes, I am. Now put down your pitch fork and listen. Because I’m not trying to kill the democracy of the Internet, I’m trying to strengthen it.
Search your local friendly search engine for the phrase "newspaper editor". People overwhelm the results. Repeat this exercise with "blog editor". No people. Just software.
There are a lot of people that think this is a good thing. Maybe they’re right. What if they’re not?
What if you had a handful of people read every post you made, just before it went public? One person might comment on grammar, the other on formatting. Maybe another on the content itself. Each person might do all three.
The crux of the issue is simple, when you post to your blog, people see it, they read it, comment, and move on. Each post only gets one shot. If it doesn’t have the effect you were hoping for? The punch you were counting on? Too bad.
With blog editors, you would have smart, useful and pointed feedback. Before your work was exposed to the harsh, biting elements of the blogosphere.
Heck, you might even become a better writer in the first place.
technorati tags: what-if,
February 25th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
Editors don’t make the content of writing any better, just easier to understand for the reader.
Paul Graham makes some good points about this in http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html .
“Editors. They control the topics you can write about, and they can generally rewrite whatever you produce. The result is to damp extremes. Editing yields 95th percentile writing– 95% of articles are improved by it, but 5% are dragged down.
…
On the web, people can publish whatever they want. Nearly all of it falls short of the editor-damped writing in print publications. But the pool of writers is very, very large. If it’s large enough, the lack of damping means the best writing online should surpass the best in print. [3] And now that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff, the web wins net. Selection beats damping, for the same reason market economies beat centrally planned ones.”
If you take this to an extreme - blog editors would kill what make blogs good - pure, edgy and unfiltered (undampened) opinions.
If you the post you’re writing doesn’t make the ripples you want it to, rewrite it, or write another. Then do it again. Repeat until you can get your point across and let your readers be your editors - but don’t let them filter your content.
-J