Monday 6 March 2006

Pic of the day: Typical Norwegian Norwegianity.

Nettdagbok?

I have once again thought about making a small online journal or preferably blog in Norwegian.

I did that some time ago (well, a few years ago) with the LiveJournal blakk_kylling. But that blog was very specialized, writing only about Norwegian language and culture and occasionally politics that were of little interest to the outside world. To put it bluntly, there is hardly a market for something so specialized, at least not in New Norwegian.

Writing in New Norwegian is a simple way to assure that only intelligent Norwegians read it, because it is a minority language that is so similar to mainstream Norwegian that an intelligent reader can easily translate it in his head while reading. Those who lack that degree of brainpower would not understand what I wrote either, because I did not write for stupid people. Unfortunately "Norwegian" and "not stupid" reduces the potential reader group already, since most people anywhere are stupid, and our country has the population of just 4.5 million. That's about the same of those cities you remember the name of only when you see it. Smaller than Paris or London, but bigger than Hickoryville and Schickzahlplatz. (Actually it's a little more than Atlanta, which you have surely heard of if you live in the United States. Then again you have heard about Norway too, if you live in Europe.)

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The LiveJournal is pretty much discontinued. It was too much work for zero readers. I don't write to satisfy myself; I have a good idea about how to do that otherwise. I write to be read. Not necessarily by lots of people. Being read by lots of people usually means you are stroking the dumb, since lots of people are dumb and they prefer to read things that make them feel good. Having one reader may well be enough for me. Unfortunately that seemed to be more than I had with that blog, and so it stopped.

I'd like something similar to the Chaos Node in that it would mix the private and the public, but it would be less frequent obviously and have a more local perspective. But I am not really sure what to do. Revive Blakk Kylling but with a broader scope? Make a new LiveJournal? Run a blog from my ChaosNode domain, which is sorely under-utilized? Simply write a few pages in Norwegian in the Chaos Node? The latter has the benefit that I could use it to fill out days, when I start to lag behind, like now. But it would be a letdown for my regular readers to click on a "yesterday" link and get something in a weird language. So it would more likely be in a parallel file system. And then I would still have to write the usual stuff and at the same time write another journal that was difficult to comment on.

People normally don't send me e-mail, after all. There are only two who do that fairly regularly, and almost never a guest, although there is pretty heavy traffic on the site. Blogs are easier to comment on. The comment feature is not just integrated, it is the heart of a blog. You don't read a blog to learn, you read a blog to discuss. Learning still happens, of course. In fact, discussing something is one of the few effective ways to learn, except for practicing. If I had started the Chaos Node now, I would have made it a blog rather than a simple letter to my friends. But by now it is an institution, and I am loath to change it.

When the Chaos Node was new, many of my readers were in fact Norwegian. I am pretty sure it was around half for a while, from the rough statistics I gathered. (I don't spy on my readers, but I got a report of domain name statistics.) But the proportion has gone down steadily. In part I think this is because Norwegians now have many online diaries to read in Norwegians, or "nettdagbøker" as it is called here. Perhaps I am just greedy. How many people among 4.5 million would read the journal of a middle aged man who doesn't have sex, but plays computer games, watches the world economy and waits for a revolution of the mind? It is hard enough to find someone among 6 billion to read that.