The discussion on my latest car parks piece here a couple of postings down has widened out, via the alleged boringness of talking about car parks, into the matter of being boring in general. David Sucher of City Comforts had this to say, a few hours ago:

As to your other point about the "boring" comment: I noticed it too and got the strangest sensation. I have seen such comments before in other fora. They puzzle me as the bandwidth on the web is essentially unlimited; don't like a post? Hit the "next" key. Why in the world would someone try to stop a conversation? When all they have to do is ignore it? I pondered making a response but as I feel very much a guest and newcomer on Samizdata, I decided to remain silent.

I read posts on Samizdata, Blowhards, Crooked, etc etc. – hey even "Brian's!" – and I pass many of them by as simply not of interest to me. In fact I would guess the majority of posts are – while most likely very intelligent and worthy – simply not something I have the energy on which to focus. In some caes I might even think them silly. I imagine that most of us feel the same way, except about different posts, of course. (Isn't there some expression about "free market of ideas"?)

But I would never even for a wild moment think of telling someone to cease a conversation. (Unless –maybe – I thought them offensive in racial, ethnic etc etc. sense.) So I was struck as a matter of "netiquette" by that remark. So the issue I suggest is broader than simply some people not being interested in parking.

Well, if I was Perry de Havilland, Lord High Everything of Samizdata, I just might think of telling one of us writers there something exactly like that. My niggle about that "boring" complaint about the car parks question wasn't me saying that being boring doesn't matter. Rather was it me saying, as David himself has also re-emphasised at CCB, that if you are interested in the way that cities and towns look and feel and work the matter of parking cars is most definitely not boring. But that doesn't mean that I don't worry about being boring, or think that being boring when blogging is not any kind of problem.

And David gets this too, as he proves with his reference to him being a "guest and a newcomer" to Samizdata, and as such, not someone who is entitled to barge in and yank the agenda this way or that, i.e. towards subjects that Samizdata's editors and core readership might reckon to be boring. Well, he may be entitled, but if he does this too obtrusively, he may not be liked.

In other words, there is another economics idea that affects blogs, besides the mere free market in ideas idea, beyond that is, the claim that you can post or comment whatever and however you damn well please. I refer to what the economists call transaction costs. If you go to a new blog, written by what seems to be a promising looking writer or clutch of writers, but after a week or so of reading everything they put there you decide that about four out of six of the posts you are reading there are (to you) boring, or maybe even more actively unpleasant in some way, this will definitely affect your willingness to hunt out those two (to you) better ones, and to keep on doing it. Life's too short and the blogosphere is too big. Blog bandwidth may be unlimited, but yours and mine isn't.

Perry chooses his Samizdata writers with care. If a new writer shows up there, you may be sure that much thought went into the matter of inviting him, and probably quite a few editorial guidance e-mails also.

I definitely feel a certain pressure, when composing stuff to put on Samizdata. That hit rate is not there to be abused for my merely private satisfaction, merely to get personal slices of beef off my nerdy little chest, however often it may seem that way. I post there with a conscious sense of duty – to inform, entertain, divert, and, let's face it, quite often to give that particular kind of reading pleasure that consists of a core readership having its prejudices confirmed.

All the above is part of why I believe in blogging in several different places, and in particular why I believe that some of these places should be mine to ruin, mine to bore in, places where what I'm interested in is what the readers are interested in and what the readers are interested in is what I'm interested in, by definition, because that's the deal. I want places where I can think aloud, drone on, repeat myself, contradict myself, worry away at bones of extremely specialised interest (I seem to be in meat metaphor mode today), and generally drone on and repeat myself. But, I don't want to do this where this is not the agenda.

Some writers are content to make the effort whenever they write (these two guys strike me as a perfect example of that), the way I do when I'm writing for Samizdata. But for me that wouldn't be enough. I love blogging. (Again, this is a sentiment that David echoes with a quote from another blogger who feels likewise.) There are things that I find myself saying, at my two Brian's blogs and at this one especially, which (a) I consider interesting, but which (b) I could only have found myself saying because the obligation to interest was suspended. This is my ego-blog. If my ego offends, stay away.

I wouldn’t dare put this posting on Samizdata. Maybe some of the readers there would like it. Maybe. (But if they like my ego that much, let them come here. They can do that, can't they?) But a lot of them would surely say to themselves, and very possibly to the now massive Samizdata comments subculture: puh-lease (not an Americanism that I care for but it's the kind of thing some of them like), not a(nother) boring blog posting about the potential or actual boringness of blog postings. Give me (see previous sentence) a break. And I do.

Maybe, because of the way that not having to be interesting can sometimes result in extreme interestingness, there are postings here that Perry and the Samizdata readers would have liked to be on Samizdata. But if I shovelled all this stuff onto Samizdata, and all my Brian's Education stuff, and all of my more occasional stuff here, or here, or (my most recently acquired blog outlet) here? … puh-lease.