“It’s with a heavy heart, and much consideration, that today I would like to announce my retirement from blogging.”
Jason McCabe Calacanis

Hold the front page? Well, yes, maybe — at least of the Silicon Alley Reporter, the U.S. trade magazine he founded.

Jason Calacanis is more widely known as the man who sold a network of blogs for around $30m to AOL a few years back. He is one of Web 2.0’s highest flyers in the sense that he turned big thoughts into big bucks. He now runs his own hand-rolled search engine, Mahalo.

His resignation “post” (as purists still call them) is worthy of Victorian melodrama, leading to charges of link-baiting — a common way of driving traffic to blogs. Naturally, he denies this, claiming never to have soiled his hands with such practices. Perish the thought.

He will, he says, replace his blogging activities with a private email list comprising roughly 1000 subscribers, all drawn from a group he calls “insiders”. These are intelligent, tech and business types of the kind most often found in Silicon Valley, California. So if you’re an Albanian circus performer with limited English, don’t bother to apply.

Why this move, and why now? Obvious answers include:

1. blogging has had its day.
2. attention spans are getting shorter, hence Twitter.
3. good bloggers often work as hard as journalists for little pay.
4. blogging has failed to build a reputation for quality.
5. spam comments have brought the system to its knees.
6. blog comments have let in demons from the outer darkness.

And there are many more reasons than those.

For good writers with something original to say, blogging has become a downward-leveller, rather than an enabler, as originally intended by weblog pioneers like Dave Winer. If you are a serious blogger, most readers will assume your opinions are prejudices, and ranting your principal method of communication. Otherwise, why don’t you write for The Guardian or Scientific American?

Commenters will lead you to believe the worst of the human race, which is why the traffic lights at the top of this site read “Comments OFF, Email ON.” Signs like this are becoming more prevalent around the “blogosphere” as people start to audit their return on capital from blogging.

The email list system is more like a private forum in which selected subscribers discuss topics in a “thread,” in this case the leader of the group’s weekly email. As a method of publishing to a coterie of like-minded individuals who are able to develop the arguments and refine them in a civilized fashion, the list has much to commend it. It’s also very cheap — no paper, printing and postage costs, or time-overhead batting away the daft, stupid, nasty and positively evil intruders.

For an author writing a nonfiction book with closely-argued chapters, it would be an excellent way of fact-checking the material and the logic of its presentation bit by bit, without having to submit it to academic specialists for verification before publishing.

In Jason Calacanis’s case, I would suspect he just wants to express himself in writing without all the hassle from trolls and oddballs.

In the end, the wisdom of crowds is no such thing because the most reckless, outspoken elements inevitably rise to leadership positions, drowning out more measured voices.

Meritocracy — the spirit of excellence, with decisions taken at points of maximum competence — always needs nurturing in cell-like establishments.

Let’s face it, the world is too big for any one individual to make much of an impact without vast wealth or political power. The blogosphere has become so enormous, comprised of multitudes of tiny, discrete pieces that it takes on the laws of quantum physics rather than the world of direct contact with our peers that humans crave.

There’s no worse tragedy than to have communicated widely for years only to discover that the throng out there still doesn’t know what you’ve been talking about.

I would never stream my Twitterings on any normal website, but I thought you might appreciate a small selection of them here:

Why does Twitter ask, “What are you doing?” above the write box? Why not “What are you thinking?” Better still, “Why are you doing that?”

Blackberry 9000 on horizon. Just ordered Curve. Should I cancel and wait?

UK Gov on 23pc in new poll. Conservatives on 49pc. The next election is all over.

Moneyizor. The failing eurozone: http://www.moneyizor.com/2008/05/09/the-failing-eurozone/

I was disappointed with Yanik Silver’s book “Moonlighting on the Internet”. Sooo Web 1.0 Minus. Old hat Plus.

Considering buying “Problogger The Book”, but have I read it all on the site? Can anyone convince me it’s a good investment?

Twittergram sounds like a good service in embryo. See Dave Winer. Let’s hope it surfaces soon.

It’s nearly 1pm and I haven’t started my 3-hour working day. Wandering around book shops and buying an Aussie hat absorbed my morning.

Just bought Herman Hesse’s “Narcissus and Goldmund”. It’s the only one I haven’t read. Also John Buchan’s “Sick Heart River”.

Switched Syntagma to full feed. Resisted long and hard but the tide is irresistible.

Steve Rubel thinks that Renaissance Man is doomed because of the internet. The thing is, RM only uses the i/n sparingly. He reads many books.

New Mayor of London has appointed Bill Bratton to clean up London as he did NYC under Giuliani. Great Move. Congrats Boris.

My problem is I find it hard to work when the sun is shining. This is why I never moved to California.

And lots more, folks. Roll up at http://twitter.com/Syntagma. 140 characters of …

Please finish the sentence yourself.

Matt Craven has written an interesting piece about Dave Winer over at The Blog Herald.

Along with a personal assessment, he brings up a recent Scripting News post which speculates, “What does an algorithm think?” — something I’ve often thought about, especially when falling foul of Google’s.

Dave’s post doesn’t actually answer the question, but has a little moan about posts on Techmeme : “Most of the authors don’t know the first thing about technology, never took a computer science class, have never written code, and don’t admit that understanding tech is a prerequisite for writing about it.”

In other words, only code writers need apply.

Now, I usually put myself in the ignorant category, unfairly as you’ll see — but being unfair to oneself is better than over-spicing the pudding.

Back in the 1980s when real computers were IBM mainframes or PDP 11 “mini” computers, and the hoi-polloi like me had to make do with “micros”, which really were micro then, I had a startup called, Earlgate Computers. It developed and produced software for the Sinclair Spectrum, the BBC (Acorn) computer and one or two others, like the Atari and Commodore 64. All utter relics now.

Yours truly wrote a series of programs titled, Fitness Software, which was aimed at the running and marathon craze of the period. The packages, on cassette tape, were written in Basic, and the series sold to two big retail chains in the UK, Boots and W.H. Smith.

Even so, I wouldn’t claim I’m a developer or a programmer by today’s standards, although I have written commercial code. I usually muddle through with the latest gizmos and avoid too much complexity where possible.

Nevertheless, I do get onto Techmeme regularly, so presumably fall into Dave’s “waste of space” class. I think he’s probably right.

However, a word of warning. Narrowly-based communities that talk to each other in jargon incomprehensible to even an intelligent audience, really belong in a social network niche, not on mainstream tools of the blogosphere. People with peripheral skills and general interests can often bring new perspectives and shine light into dark corners otherwise missed.

As Matt writes, Dave comes across as an irascible sort of fellow, forever banging on about RSS and outliners. Not quite “Hold The Front Page!” stuff.

His other strand, U.S. politics in election year, is much better, even for a Brit like me. I happen to be very interested in who or what the next President of the U.S. of A. will be.

Now for the unanswered question : what DOES an algorithm think?

It doesn’t.

As it’s Good Friday we spent the morning discussing sages — as you do. The topic arose from the death of Arthur C. Clarke (pictured), the science fiction author and inventor of synchronous-orbiting satellites.

I once partly collaborated with him on a book project I was writing for BT. He kindly gave me full access to his library and archives in Taunton, the family home town. He always struck me as a sagelike character interested in shaping a better future from a troublesome present and even worse past. Maybe that’s a good definition of a sage.

But are there any other sages left, especially in the online world which most of our readers inhabit?

A number of living sages sprang to mind. For example, Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, whose advice on investment must be worth a bob or two.

Bill Gates? I think so. He’s veered far from his specialism during his long career and always has views on the shape of things to come. As indeed has Steve Jobs of Apple.

But are they too self-interested to be real sages? Shouldn’t sagacity float free of any self-partiality? That doesn’t leave many to choose from, does it?

I think we should accept the above three figures as sages, with minor reservations. Although they are never going to be Mahatma Gandhis — money just gets in the way somehow.

So who then is The Sage of the Blogosphere?

Dave Winer pops up from beneath the parapet. He writes long and often at Scripting News. If you eliminate the endless links — none has ever come Syntagma’s way, incidentally, but we’re above all that — his longer pieces tend to have a careful, sagelike quality about them.

His problem is that he’s a bit too liberal (in the UK read “left-wing”). A sage should surely not support a political party. Their manifestos are written for idiots by half-baked zealots.

Does zealotry crush sagacity? I think so.

Who else? There are lots of authors in the tech blogosphere who write long articles of a philosophical and speculative nature — Jeff Jarvis, anyone? And I can think of a dozen more. John Battelle, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis …

And how about Tim Berners-Lee who “invented” the Worldwide Web, the internet as we know it. He also writes persuasively about its future as the Semantic Web — Web 3.0 — and was recently given the Order of Merit by the Queen, one of the highest honours in the land.

However, sages should stand out more than just being brilliant at what they do — shouldn’t they?

Questions, questions.

In the political blogosphere Andrew Sullivan writes deeply and never uninterestingly about matters of the day. Last week was a departure when he covered the future of video blogging. But is he a sage? Would he want to be?

Maybe the internet is not the right medium for sages of the old school. Are there sages of the new school?

Perhaps we don’t recognize them yet. Only hindsight will make them stand out from the pack. After all, Arthur C. Clarke was not regarded as a sage when he wrote wildly about satellites in the 1940’s magazine Wireless World. It was only later when small bits of technology were dumped at 22,000 miles above the planet that his foresight was spotted.

I think I’d better leave the question open : who is The Sage of the Blogosphere?

To paraphrase that undoubted sage, Albert Einstein, “Not everyone that counts can be counted, and not everyone that can be counted counts”.

Update : After much thought on this question, I’ve decided that my candidate for The Sage of the Blogosphere is Robert X. Cringely.