ince I've been blogging since January of 2002, and was regularly reading blogs for several years before then, the whole "blogging phenomena" seems very commonplace to me, by now. It therefore seems odd to me when I read some newspaper or magazine article about blogging, especially when it (the article) is written for the non-blog-savvy general public.  I'm like, "How is blogging still news to anyone?" But if I try, I can sort of remember back before I was reading blogs, and making due with just the boring, flat news reporting I read on Yahoo, and had nothing on my bookmarks list that I could count on for fresh content every day, other than comics and porn sites.  Back then, I would probably have been skeptical and clueless about blogs, wondering why I would ever care to read about someone's dog, or boyfriend breakup, or why I should care about the opinion of some guy living in his parent's basement, when news was breaking.

Blogs are still new and strange, and traditional media feels a pressure to analyze and discuss them, even if it's just for the benefit of their readers. Even as they (the mainstream media) are doing all they can to co-op and Borg up blogs, or draw traffic with their own versions of them.

More recent items are added on top of this page.

November 4, 2003

One study of 3,634 blogs found that two-thirds had not been updated for at least two months and a quarter not since Day One.

"Some would say, `I'm going to be too busy but I'll get back to it,' but never did," said Jeffrey Henning, chief technology officer with Perseus Development Corp., the research company that did the study. "Most just kind of stopped."

May 19, 2003

Dooce's latest update is a good one.  Apparently the NY Times ran an article about blogs, and one of the ones they profiled was hers. This resulted in an influx of clue-deprived non-blog readers, who clearly thought they were slumming by viewing a blog, and therefore felt compelled to express their delusions of superiority to the slumlord.  Dooce herself, in this case. As her update relates:

High-minded Times reader Leslie Morsillo, in an email titled “can’t help myself” says: “Found my way to your site via an article on blogs, so yours may be my first AND my last. My only suggestion is that you lose the camera, at least until you have something to say — the photographs have all the wit and soul of a Hallmark card. That’s the truth, sorry.”

To which I responded, sincerely: “does sending email like this make you feel better about yourself?”

High-minded Times reader Leslie Morsillo then responded: “why yes, doctor, thank you for asking. how much better do you feel by publicizng your impatience with the world and posting rambling insults to total strangers? for all the effort you put into your website, you should aim higher. in the meantime, go give blood.”

Why can't I get mail like that?  I would kill for stupidity of that nature.  Reading a blog advertised as a personal one, and then complaining to the person running it that they're posting too much personal stuff is just astonishingly dumb.  Do you go to McDonalds and insult them for serving hamburgers, when you wanted Chinese food?  Dumbass.

Thusly motivated, I hunted up the NYTimes article, which you can read here, assuming you're registered to view the NYTimes site. If not, bring two forms of ID. The article is mostly about how people write things about friends or family on their blogs, thinking they can speak freely, and then get into trouble when the friends or family end up reading it somehow.  Total nitpicking honesty is never a real good idea about friends/family. The Dooce portion details the double whammy she suffered by being too honest and candid on her site:

Heather Armstrong, a 27-year-old Web designer from Utah whose blog is at www.dooce.com, might be the ultimate example of blogging gone awry. Her parents are devout Mormons, she said, but because they are also technophobes, she felt perfectly comfortable publishing an entry on her site in which she harshly criticized her Mormon upbringing.

Unfortunately for Ms. Armstrong, her brother in Seattle stumbled across her Web site that very day and alerted her parents to the entry. After that, Ms. Armstrong said, "all hell broke loose." "Next to my parents getting divorced 20 years ago," Ms. Armstrong said, "it was the worst thing that ever happened to my family. It was shocking for everyone."

Ms. Armstrong's run-in with the perils of self-publishing did not end there. She also wrote about her job and her co-workers in her blog, often hyperbolically.

When her bosses were alerted that Ms. Armstrong was writing about her office life, they fired her, she said. She is now much more careful about what she publishes in her blog, and she had a word of caution for bloggers who write furtively about others. "If you're publishing under your own name, they'll find out," she said. "I was extremely naïve."

So um, yeah.

Your bosses know that you and all of the other employees spend much of your free time talking shit about them, and they are in the main office eating donuts and talking shit about you in return.  Which is all good, until something gets into virtual print, when it becomes much more formal and part of a record.  And remember, you're (most likely) the employee; keep in mind who can fire whom.

Funny how it's always so much easier to give advice than to take it.  Even when it's your own advice.

The article also discusses why so many bloggers talk about such odd stuff in their personal lives.

Indeed, for many bloggers being noticed seems to be the point. John M. Grohol, a psychologist in the Boston area who has written about bloggers, said they often offered intimate details of their lives as a ploy to build readership.

"It's like, `How do I get people to read this?' " he said. "Then you want them to keep reading it. It becomes a snowball rolling downhill that becomes very rewarding for the blogger because they're getting feedback from their friends and from random folks."

So um, yeah.

I was going to write something this morning about how eager I am to at last go spend time with Malaya, and how I'm leaving Tuesday morning, in just over 30 hours.  And how we're both withholding sex (from ourselves) for several days in advance.  And how that's not ordinarily a big deal, except that ordinarily we're not spending a couple/several hours engaged in relatively hot phone chat of a speculative, predictive, and tantalizing nature with the person on earth we most desire sexually.  Which is a very long way to say that I am so fucking horny right now.

But that sort of borderline-TMI disclosure would just be a cheap "love me daddy" ploy to get and keep more readers, and therefore I would never stoop to it.  Why next I'd be writing condom or sexual position reviews with Malaya, or something outrageous like that.  If you can imagine!

April 13, 2003

While clicking through links from various unknown blogs to other various unknown blogs, I saw somewhere a link to this amazing page. It's some TV production company that wants to make a TV show about... blogging.  Now I guess this was inevitable, what with blogs being the hot semi-new thing now, but can you picture how lame a TV show about it would be?  I mean let's imagine BlackChampagne.com is profiled one week.  Overlooking the fact that this isn't really a blog, what would they do?  Film me sitting here, typing?  Surfing? Reading emails/deleting spam and Klez?  That would be a big ratings winner there, huh?  Let's watch a TV show about something we'd learn more from just getting on the Internet and reading in the first place!

Now the blogs that will be shown are probably wacky ones that look good on TV, but would be unreadable.  I mean various hot chicks will mail in about how they blog in the nude, they'll find some crazed neo-nazi with a blog about how he likes to spray paint Swastikas on Synagogues, some nutty chick with a blog dictated to her by her cat, etc.  Which might actually make an semi-interesting TV show, but you know none of them would be worth actually adding to your bookmarks.

Then again, they are trying to make a successful TV show, not a links page, so that's probably fine with them.

March 26, 2003

A new blog getting a ton of attention, to the point that it's usually inaccessible due to the heavy traffic, is Salam Pax.  Blogspot and Google seem to be throwing more server muscle behind it now though, and it's up as I type this. The reason this blog is so suddenly a sensation is that it's being maintained by someone in Baghdad, Iraq, who writes it in English. There are supposedly a few others from Baghdad or Iraq now, but they are in Arabic. The most popular story on US Yahoo right now is talking about it, and it's been mentioned in numerous major newspapers as well.

He has spoken against the invasion but clearly has no great love for Iraq's Baathist leaders.

"Freaks. Hurling abuse at the world is the only thing left for them to do," he said last week after media appearances by Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf and Interior Minister Mahmoud Diyab al-Ahmed.

But he does not like seeing his city bombed either. "The only thing I could think of was 'why does this have to happen to Baghdad'. As one of the buildings I really love went up in a huge explosion I was close to tears," he wrote on Saturday.

August 23, 2002

Check out this article about the best and worst celebrity blog sites.  The funniest quote is a line is from Ru Paul's blog, when talking about a gay designer on the Anna Nicole Smith show.

"He is to interior design what Don King is to the world of boxing," RuPaul wrote Aug. 12. "I watched the show last night in the company of some other gays, and some of the comments in the room were 'He sets gay people back 20 years' and 'If he says LUXURIOUS one more time, I'm going to eat my own vomit. ' "

Wil Wheaton's site is ranked the best, though there isn't a whole lot of competition for the prize, given how lame the other sites are.  It's also debatable if he's really a "celebrity" at this point.  Most of us remember him as the generally-annoying Wesley Crusher on Star Trek, and starring in Stand By Me, but those were both over 10 years ago.  He's known now mostly for his blog, and in uber-geek circles.

Wil's site is the easy winner since he runs a full-service blog with fair to good content, while the other blogs by celebs are just occasionally updated, and you sort of figure 95% of the time it's their manager or an intern at their publicist's anyway. Wil is very easy-going and a regular guy on his blog, which endears him to the rest of the blogging community; at least I've seen a lot of links to him, far more than the quality of his content would seem to deserve.

April 3, 2002

This article in the Boston Globe features yet another old school print journalist taking his turn sniffing dismissively about blogs. Lileks was where I saw the link, and he has a few choice comments about it there.

This newspaper article is the sort of thing (old media hates us!) most bloggers get out the sharp knives for, but I don't really see any point in bitching about it.  It just makes you (the blogger) look defensive.  Better to let the newspaper guy dig his own shallow grave in the *insert clever metaphor here* dwindling days of his relevancy.

I seldom read the San Diego paper, it's much too small-minded and conservative for my taste, and just in general, newspapers are slow.  Slow to report news, slow to read, and slow to physical navigate.  Turning pages and straining your eyes at blurry type is far less enjoyable than viewing on a monitor, with color settings and point size and brightness to your specifications. I much prefer reading news and articles on the Internet to any newspaper.  Magazines aren't bad, portable, easy to read in the tub, pretty colors.  Just a week out of date, and very limited in their scope due to size constraints.

In a more specific sense, I don't care about San Diego.  It's not bad, but I don't have any real interest in anything locally.  No idea who any of the city council members are, I know nothing about the school board, etc.  I could name the mayor, but only just. I've lived here since high school, but not for any particular reason.  Both my mom and dad live in town (separately, they've been divorced since I was a kid) and it's nice to see them regularly, and the weather here is great in the winter and spring, and the summer is too hot, but still better than 99% of the rest of the country.  And I have a decently-paying job that I hate, but it has great hours, and I'm too lazy to quit and do something I'd enjoy more.

So I when I do read the local paper I just skim the front page section, and maybe some of the sports and comics, but really it could be any paper from anywhere.  I get most of my news and info from the internet.  Local TV news is just unwatchable also, choked with pointless, unimportant local interest stories.  I don't care if some kid drowned or ran in front of a car or a school had a fire alarm malfunction.  How does that effect me in any way?  If I know the kid or go to the school I know about it already, and know a lot more than the 3 minute news segment will present.  Otherwise it doesn't effect me in any way, and is far less interesting than war in the Middle East, or whatever stupid thing Dubya did most recently, etc.

I'm drifting far afield, but my initial point was that I don't much care for the paper, preferring the internet news to it, and don't care for local TV news at all, though that's irrelevant to the issue.

Newspapers are slow to navigate and cumbersome and becoming largely irrelevant, as their readership declines steadily every year.  I'll glance through one or even read the vapid articles if I'm stuck in the auto repair shop, or waiting for the dentist, but otherwise, there's too much else to do to spend time on it.

Perhaps if I could click instantly to the 10 most interesting stories in a dozen newspapers around the country and world, I'd do so.  And guess what?  On the internet you can.

So while the Internet presents a better reading experience, I'm talking about CNN.com or Yahoo news. What about blogs, which are what the Boston Globe article is specifically blah'ing on.

Sure, the writing quality in blogs varies.  Often people doing them have mediocre language skills, can't organize their thoughts in a logical stream, or tend to ramble *cough*, but they are much more personal and heartfelt than the generally-distant and cold prose in the newspaper.

Blogs have no 500 max word limit, so are free to quote extensively from an article of interest, providing a counter point.  They can also explain things in great detail, present news and opinion at the same time, and their biggest advantage over archaic print media is the hyperlink.   Having additional information instantly accessible with a click of the rodent is an enormous advantage.  Plus they are free.  If a blog is boring one day, or in general, you don't read it again, or skip back to something else.  There are always other options.  The local paper doesn't have an article about what you wanted to read about that day, you can wait for tomorrow, and hold your breath until you turn turquoise, for all the good that will do you.  Call up the editor and speak to his voice mail, if it makes you feel better. You can't contact the news sources on Yahoo or the AP wire either, but with a blog you can, and will probably get a reply, unless it's one of the super busy ones or one run by some pompous ass.  Or both.

I think the problem with blogs, to the outsider, is the sheer quantity of them.  And the insider as well, if I'm really inside anything.  I'm sure there are hundreds I'd love to read, but how the hell to find them?  500,000 or something at Blogger.com, thousands more on various other blog portals, and then add all the others out there like this one, or well-known ones like Lileks or Andrew Sullivan or Tom Tomorrow that aren't part of any main blog portal.  The gross profusion of blogs, and hundreds more every day, make it seem difficult to get into.  I don't care enough about finding new ones to sift through the multitudes you can find with any slight effort to search them out, so I doubt many other people do either.  In theory the cream will rise to the top, and good ones will get linkage and become more popular, and can grow in popularity very quickly, with virtually no cost of production, and easy access for anyone on earth.  Some great new magazine starts up in Kansas City, how is anyone else going to know about it or obtain it?  But if it's a new blog, anyone can find it and view it effortlessly.

Probably the old "spam every day vs. steak twice a week" analogy applies to blogs, at least that's the theory of Alex Beam in the article linked to above, since his main complaint about good blogs seems to be that they are updated so regularly.  Which is an odd PoV.  I mean the news would be better if it were once a week for an hour, rather than every day for 30 minutes, but in theory you want the news since you want info now, not slightly more cleverly-produced news five days later.

It's unclear why newspaper guys feel the need to bitch about blogs.  I've never seen a blog bitching about the newspaper (well, aside from about 6 paragraphs up this page), other than when there is discussion of yet another anti-blogging article.  The easy explanation is that newspapers are paranoid of their audience being taken away, but it's not like that started with blogs. It's been going for years, and TV news and major Internet news sites are the real culprits there.

I think it's a more basic issue, perhaps that reporters don't like that anyone can have their words read online?  After all, it's hard to get a job in print media where you are doing anything approaching editorializing, which is what anyone with an opinion (and enough ego to think anyone cares about their opinion) wants to do. Reporters with the freedom to waste column inches on frivolities like criticizing blogs worked for years covering crap like school board meetings, editing ad copy, typing up obits, and calling around the sanitation department to get info on the sewer line break on 4th Avenue.  They had to churn out unimportant, meaningless, space-filling news for years before they could take pot shots at the president in print, and by god bloggers should too!

Anyway, I don't really see blogs vs. newspapers as an either/or.  Read both if you want, or neither.  Given that newspaper readership has been plummeting for at least the past decade, obviously they aren't as popular as the old days, when most towns had a dozen papers, all locked in vicious competition.  Bloggers realize that most people are reading multiple blogs, and it's not like you need a quarter to read each one, so there's no reason to fight or try to deny each other an audience.  Link and link alike, and comment on each other, positively or negatively, as the situation warrants.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.