Well, that’s what it must feel like, anyway, what with the sharp decline in print revenues. Look, it would be highly appropos for me to be blogger-centric, and proclaim like many others, that print is Dead. But that would be silly.

Print will survive, but in another form. And they won’t be nearly as large, or have as wide a circulation. They’ll find their own niche, whether it be in a completely free format or otherwise. Much like older media (such as the radio), it will evolve because it has to. But I don’t think its quite in the same boat as, say, the telegraph.

Man, its like I’ve said this before.

Oh, wait.

I have — in my 2007 predictions! :)

Smugness aside, yes, print media will change, and yes, journalists will have to evolve an ever flexible tool set of skills to draw upon.

But “saving” print media by some silly protectionist ideas is just … well, silly. I mean, come on. Creating an embargo of print media so we can all learn to value what real journalists do? Its all well meaning, but its practically (literally) impossible to execute.

In fact — again, its an argument we’ve heard before.

And like last time, print journalists seem to ignore the fact that we can get the news from all kinds of sources, even the television. If online media is denied to “new media” types (read: bloggers), that’s fine, because, quite frankly, we can get the news somewhere else … literally.

The issues around the living death of print media and pre-eminence of new media is something that is growing. And I suspect its something that we’ll all hear about for quite a while to come as more print companies get into trouble, outright fold, get bought out, or move to an on-line presence altogether.

Well, all debates about a-listers aside (and as an aside, do you think anything but an a-lister who has a history of anti-PPP rhetoric could pull ted murphy on to his podcast?), I feel that when you’ve issued, or answered a challenge, or declared a bet, or asserted your position on something — and it turns out that you’ve lost, it seems the right thing to do — the classy thing to do — is clear.

Own up to it.

Either Mr. Calacanis isn’t in the habit of doing this, or, perhaps he’s merely too busy with his other projects to comment in person (although not too busy to answer challenges, declare bets, or make public claims, in the first place, of course).

But some time ago Mr. Calacanis decided to paint the SEO industry in a negative light, in some fairly broad strokes. Something to the effect that (I’m paraphrasing here) most SEOs were charlatans, and that all a blogger (or site owner) needed to do was concentrate on good content, and the rest would take care of itself.

Any six year old, however, can tell you how false that is.

But, Neil Patel of ProNet Advertising decided to issue a challenge of his own some weeks ago, stating in effect that he could increase Mr. Calacanis’s own blog’s traffic with SEO methods *alone* … and without any shady tactics, naturally.

Well, the results are in, and sure enough, Neil’s results speak for themselves. Traffic has indeed risen more than 20% with only 10% of the changes that they intended to make. No funny blackhat chicannery here.

Where’s Mr. Calacanis now?

No comments in the blog post to acknowledge Neil’s work.

Nothing in his own blog in spite of a spate of anti-SEO rants.

Is this surprising?

Not really, because its happened before.

Twice.

1. The Digg “Sushi” Bet: After all, Mr. Calacanis made a public “bet” in the fall of last year claiming that Digg would start paying its top users, just like Netscape did, by the end of the year. Digg hasn’t, and sure enough, Mr. Calacanis didn’t offer any follow up in this regard (in fact it was a Sushi bet for folks living in LA/ NYC — my feeling is that no one has taken him up on the bet).

2. The Alexa Challenge: How about the time Mr. Calacanis wanted to “game” Alexa to show how crappy it was (it still is, but that’s besides the point). He asked his users to install Alexa and cause an artificial spike in traffic. Sure enough, nothing really happened — I went to the trouble of breaking things down, actually — and, sure enough, nothing on Mr. Calacanis’s end either.

I’m not going to chalk this up to a-list anything. That conversation’s long past (and quite frankly was already past when Mr. Calacanis decided to pick it up almost two months after I started it … but that’s neither here nor there) its expiry date.

But, jeez man.

You’re happy to stand on the tallest mountain and beat your chest when you think you’re right.

How about when you’re wrong?

It kind of got buried in the text of the “here’s who won” post a few days ago, but Joost is now accepting ALL beta applications until “the end of Thursday”.  I’m only posting this up because people are leaving comments asking about Joost invites and a) I have no more to give, sorry and b) everyone can get one if they sign up right now, since I’m not sure which time zone “the end of Thursday” is.

Sign up right here

• Almost two months ago, I wrote a post decrying how “a-listers” were poo-pooing payperpost as evil incarnate, without acknowledging that not all bloggers have the luxury of *not* trying such methods to earn some money. I called them “blue collar bloggers”.
• It was hardly noticed, and I moved on.
• Six days ago, Lorelle picked up on my post, commenting on how “blue collar bloggers” rarely get much press
• Five days ago, Jason Calacanis decided to tell me how ludicrous it was that I was making it in to a “class” argument, when in fact there is no “a-list”, and that anyone had it in them to be sucessful, and a-list-like, if they could but follow a few steps. He was helpful in listing some of them in the comments of my post, but also on his blog.
• At this point, things were picked up by a number of places, got Techmeme’d and StumbleUpon’d, and there were lots of interesting voices that decided to chime in on a cold March weekend.

Some of the thoughts that were floating around:

• Eric Berlin wondered what it means to be an “a-lister”
• Jim Kukral waxed philisophical and wondered if the ‘a-list’ existed only in the minds of bloggers
• Jason from Webomatica wondered about the definition of an ‘a-list’ blogger
• Stan Schroeder agreed with Jason Calacanis and drew parallels between making it in the music industry and and the blogosphere
• Marshall Kirkpatrick contributed the thought that most, if not all A-listers are white men
• Hugh Mcleod dropped by, and then actually drew a comic about the situation (actually, I’m mildly honored — the guy who has “unresolved-high-school-issues” about himself is supposed to be me)
• Knots thought that there was a geographic distribution of a-listers, and who could remember an a-lister who wasn’t living in a certain parts of the US?
• Nick Denton called me whiney
• Jayson Joseph feels that being an a-lister is a function of your own success
• Robert Scoble wants us to be ‘a-listers’ in our own niche — like lawnmowing.
• Kathy Sierra chimed in that in spite of writing a highly regarded Java book, it had no bearing on her success as a blogger
• Rebecca at SEOMoz thinks Jason Calacanis is the Ann Coulter of the blogosphere
• And there is currently a three way slobber knocker between Trish Grier, Seth Finklestein and Mack.

At the end of the day, my own thoughts haven’t really changed — and there’s one thing about the conversation that erupted thereafter really seems to ignore … and that’s the real point I was trying to make.

I don’t begrudge a-listers for being a-listers, because its not an issue of blogging success. Many bloggers took that to be the substance of my beef. Its not. And that’s because being part of the a-list isn’t a function of how “good” you are at a blogger, how “well” you market your blog, or even how “interested” you are at creating blog rolls and interacting with your community.

Rather, all of those things are necessary but insufficient to be “a-list” as part of the way I was using the term. A-list isn’t about just being a good blogger. Its not just about having bongo amounts of traffic. Its not about your Adsense earnings. And its not about being highly regarded.

Folks, its about their ability to be so close to The News, that they’re either creating it, reporting it, or delivering it. These guys, through their connections, their businesses, or their activities are real influences in the real industry of choice.

You cannot BUT help but pay attention to them because they are a genuine source of News in any way that you want to define it.

And its ludicrous to say that ‘a-listers’ don’t exist. Its not an existential definition, and its not about how “good” some bloggers are. When I refer to an “a-list” I am referring to a specific set of bloggers who can make, change, and report news and opinion on a different scale by virtue of who they are, who they know, and what they are actually doing.

In the Technosphere, they *are* the news.

And its not about how “good” they blog.

Which brings me to to thank some some well-meaning attempts at educating me about how important it is to stick to “best-practices” in blogging, how important it is to be nice, write on other people’s blogs, participate as part of a community, create novel content, be frequent with your postings, generous with your outbound links, and remember how unimportant it is to have a large blog link to you.

Even if some of them are rather shrill and patronizing.

I have had my modest share of blogging success since I started out 6 months ago. I have learned, reflected and thought about what I’ve been doing right, and even was asked to write an article or two about it.

A-listers are different. They are often the subject of envy. But no matter how “good” a blogger you are, very few of us will actually be “a-list” in the way that I’ve defined. And that’s fine. I never had aspirations to be such, and I’m sorry if it sounded that way.

My original intention was to merely highlight how frustrating, and a little arrogant it was, that some a-listers didn’t recognize the stratification exists, and how independent it was of blogging effort, best practices or otherwise.

For those of you who might be new to my blog (and there might be one or two, since the weekend), I wear many hats in life, and one of them is a senior resident in internal medicine. Residents are, for the most part, physicians who have attained their MD, but who still require many more years of training before they become fully qualified (and get their license). I’m thankfully near the end of my training, but am still required to do “call” every now and again for the General Medical service.

Being “on-call” is like doing shiftwork, except that its a really, really, long shift. “In-house” call means that we have to physically be in hospital to take care of patients, and the length of time is usually mandated, where I train anyway, to be up to 32 consecutive hours. That’s almost three consecutive 12 hours shifts. Sometimes we get sleep. Sometimes we don’t.

Last night I was on-call for General Medicine, and it was a typical night. Got about 1h of sleep, saw a lot of patients, supervised a medical students and junior residents, and otherwise tried to make sure things go smoothly. Got home, showered, took a two-hour nap, and then got back to spending time with the family and some other work for Work, the BlogHerald and so on.

As I write this, it’ll be about 42 consecutive hours that I’ll have been awake, save for about 3 hours of sleep here and there. Its funny, being what residents refer to as “post-call”. Some people feel exhausted and sleep until the next day. Some people (like me) feel *so* exhausted its tough to sleep. Others (like me) also find they tend to get mentally disinhibited for periods, and at times (also me), find they have problems with word-finding, manual coordination, and verbal dexterity.

Its part of the reason why residency training has changed somewhat since the “good ol’ days”. In times past, residents, where I train, could be “on-call” every third day, and might be in hospital for 36 straight hours at a time. They didn’t name them “residents” for nothing, because many of them felt like (and were, in some ways) “residents” of the hospital. The problem, however, is that its hard to function normally after being so sleep deprived; after a while your brain gets used to it, but there is still room for enormous error. When couched in patient-safety-terms, its easy to see why there has been a movement to try and make things more humane for medical students and residents.

Actually, there was a Grey’s Anatomy episode where a resident got into a car accident post-call, and never remembered falling asleep at the wheel. Unfortunately, an not-altogether familiar phenomonon — and in fact, we’re discouraged (somewhat seriously, somewhat jovially) from making big decisions post call, driving post call, or making signficant purchases post call.

So, what’s it like blogging after being awake for almost 42 straight hours?

I guess its different for everyone.

My experience is that I ramble (look how long it took me to get to this part!). I find that its hard to put words together in a way that makes sense. There are periods that are punctuated by episodes of particular lucidness. Sometimes its followed by worry over what I’ll need to do the next day. Finding the right words can get difficult. Its like trying to grab water from a stream, only your hands feel like a sieves.

Metaphors get mixed up. Similes get smacked around. Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors become sparring partners who pummel you with relentless ease. Distraction beckons with every stray thought, and overwhelming fatigue is the fuel which makes it into an overpowering force of nature. Motivation takes a back seat to every concievable want, while logic and coherence become mere annoyances to getting your thoughts down on proverbial paper.

Oh … did I tell you that its kind of hard?

Blogging at full strength requires different parts of your brain working in harmony; I suspect blogging while extremely sleep deprived creates funny creations that don’t often make sense. Who knows what I’ll think once I wake up in a few hours and read this. Rambling drivel or interesting peek into a bloggers life?

Perhaps I should ask some mommy-bloggers what its like for them as well. Since we had a baby a few months ago, my wife finally knows what its like to walk around like a zombie at times as my son, for better for worse, only seems to be consoled by her when he’s really upset.

Have any of you blogged while being sleep deprived? What have your experiences been like? I’d like to hear from you about them. But … ahem, you’ll excuse me if I don’t wait around for that to happen, since I need to catch a few zzz’s in the meantime. ;)

The Winners are, in no particular order:

• Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Misty O’Brian
• Marlo Elaine
• Patrick

The winners will be sent their invitation tokens shortly.  Thanks again to Hart for helping me double the number of Joost invites.
Thanks to all the participatants, in the first ever DJI comments-off — those of who have blogs are listed below.

• Rod Templeton (another fellow Canadian)
• Carmen Van Kerkhove at Racialicious
• Ivan Brezak Brzkan
• Engtech at … well, Engtech
• Michael Koby at mkoby
• Derek Van Vliet at Neothoughts
• Josh Tuttle at Josh and Loraena
• Kris Karkowski at UFC Daily
• Bill Seaver at Microexplosion
• Misty O’Brian at BravegirlStudio
• Yoav at Cogniview
• Marlo at MarloElaine
• Marshall Kirkpatrick at MarshallK
• Tanner at Tech-blot
• Maki at DoshDosh

Interestingly enough, in spite of the contest, Joost is now open to all beta applications as they are moving to the next stage of development. However, things will be closed as of thursday, midnight to all applications, so if you’re interested, head on over to Joost.com to get your application in today.

Results will be posted tomorrow.

Thanks everyone for participating!