Hello again.

I have enlisted the help of a service called FeedBurner to provide a subscription service for the blog. As part of this service it provides me with stats on how many subscribers I have and some information about where they are coming from (only browser info, I don't get to know who they are).

It says: "FeedBurner Stats provides publishers with a single interface for analyzing the content consumption habits of their audience — be it feed subscribers or website/blog visitors. This insight can help you determine which content is performing best, where your audience is located, and better understand detailed information about traffic sources such as search engines." (1)

I also tried to make an account with Technorati which is a blog community site and quite interesting because it reads labels to tell us what are the hot topics at any one time in the blogosphere. Bit like the way Twitter is a window into the (mostly US) world. But Technocrati doesn't like something about me and refuses to take my blog, and I found in the small print that once you are accepted into their community they still might chuck your blog out.

They say: "Do not tag exessively. Make sure the tags you use to describe your posts really do describe your posts. If we see high occurrences of unrelated, variants and synonyms, or over-use of tags in your posts, we may conclude that your site is trying to game the system." (2)

Guess that's me then.

I am thinking about the rules that govern, the market-consumer model for people, performance/audience metaphors, organising criteria always being political, the community/exiled binary, blog-as-me-me-as-blog, where does experimentation belong?, politics of visibility (which as a term is usually associated with identity politics - sexuality, race, and so on)... The internet can only reflect our own organising structures.

A beautiful capitalist critique for you.

I wonder how many times I will go back to FeedBurner today to see if anyone else has subscribed...