During the last few days before xmas the Italian blogosphere has been moderately shaken by a conversation about self-referentiality.
Vittorio Pasteris proposes to discuss the topic at the next Italian BarCamp (the RomeCamp) and opens a wiki about it.
Ludo points out that yes, we (the Italian bloggers trying to join the Conversation) are really a small galaxy made of a few thousand self-referencing individuals (and he's got cool maps to prove that :) ).
Antonio and Svaroschi make clear that this is a common pattern among all social experiences, and there's nothing new or weird about it.
The conversation is very rich and juicy (even if may sound like deja-vu to many of you) so if you're interested in the topic and can understand Italian, follow the links above.
As for myself, I'd like just to add three points, mainly specification than full developed arguments:
Metablogging vs. snowballs
Sometime reading comments and posts about self-referentiality I feel there's a little bit of confusion in how the term is used: often in reference to conversation cross-referencing/quoting, while sometime it's used with the nuance of meta-blogging (blogging about blogs as a technology, social/cultural phenomena, etc.) that happens to be one of the main topic of my rummaging here. I suppose the whole self-referential argument is about the first use, as I can't really see what's wrong in using a tool/technology (media) to publish the results about a study on that same tool/technology (message).
Emergency needs google juice
Switching to self-referentiality as in snowball effect and cross-referencing, we must remember that this is implicit and unique of the hypertext medium: by using links to connect what we are writing with the reference we are quoting or the "object" of the sentence, we are actually serving more than on purpose.
First of all, we are doing our best to give the readers a way to go further/deeper in the conversation/topic, and possibly to find more and more links (that is, have access to more data that, hopefully, will aggregate as more useful information) to "join the dots" and eventually join the conversation itself.
Then we are declaring our trust and connection with the sources of information, thereby allowing specifically designed trust-metric algorithms (i.e. google page-rank) to rate each page (resource) based on the collective emergent trust with regards to specific topics/keywords.
Finally, as in good old academic tradition, we use cross referencing through links and quotes to give references to what we are reporting. This allows for peer review and, yes, tends to create an aristocracy of emergent gurus that are always used as paragons but (sorry) this is a legacy from the dear old academic way.
Managing expectations
While I was reading through all the noisy posts complaining about bloggers' self-referentiality I started thinking maybe it's just our fault... and by saying our I'm referring to all those bloggers that tends to (or used to) be quite visible in the Italian blogosphere landscape and (used to) focus on advocating blogs and web2.0 technologies as potential tool for
One thing the social media advocate has to learn is to manage expectations.
Moreover social media advocates (me first) should never (ever) forget to always listen to young(er) voices: we know the (current) limit for a healthy social network is around 200 individuals, but maybe you should start considering your one along the lines of a sliding window metaphor. Let it go.
On the other hand, newbies (pass me the word) should understand that the blogosphere allows everybody's voice to be heard and, as such, the noise tends to be quite significant... please make don't be shy and make yourself visible, participate in conversation, say your opinion, and be kind to the individuals: nobody here's special, it's together that we can make a difference.
If you want to change th world, love somebody.
Actually I think that thousands of people "using their blogs to talk about themselves, their passions, fears, hopes, to boost their ego or, why not, to talk about a topic, gather attention and make money out of it" *is* changing the world. :-)
Eheh, totally agree with both of you.