Chris Seper, in his Chat Room LIVE weblog, points out an article in the Inquirer naming bloggers as losers in a listing of the year's technology winners and losers.
The Inquirer article is so far out of touch with the majority of the population, the only possible response is amusement.
I mean, you can't give much credibility to an article so filled with tech jargon that it is virtually unintelligible.
And yet the author complains about blogs?
Well, Doug-over-at-the-Inquirer, here's a news flash. You could poll 100 people off the street and you'd be hard-pressed to find one who has even a clue what "UWB WiMedia" is.
And, as for dissing 3.5 inch floppies, well for every person walking around with a USB memory keychain, there are twenty people still using floppies. Those floppy users are only now thinking that maybe, just maybe, next year they'll get a computer with one of those new CD-RW drives that they're starting to hear about.
Just as you don't care about the albums or books someone is reading, Doug, the average person isn't in the slightest interested in reading about WiFi "from 54 Mbps 802.11g and offering souped-up 108 Mbps speeds in advance of 802.11n standards being formalized."
You see, what most people want is not the latest greatest technology. They have other interests, other motivations — including creativity. Blogging satisfies deep-seated human emotions and needs in a way that the latest technology never will. That's why blogging is here to stay.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
We all know blogging rocks the rectum
2 - Jan Eggers
Word.
3 - BB
Once a geek always a geek.
Great post Anita. Did Eric say he needs an enima?
4 - Craig Lyndall
I agree with you Anita, but didn't you know this was coming?
To a lot of people the idea of setting up a public forum for your own thoughts and opinions is a real self-important venture. Especially because people started out calling these things an extension of a journal, which for most of us it clearly is not because there is an audience. Anyway, for the last year or two there have been a ton of articles that always have the sentence, "blog, which is a shortened version of the word weblog, are online journals, etc. etc." So, people were interested wondering what the big deal is. Now that a huge number of people know what they are, there are bound to be people who are going to say, ok, well I have seen them now and I know what they are, but what is the big fucking deal? I don't expect a lot of these people to get it because there is no business model behind it.
Did you notice the number of times in that article that the business side was mentioned? We know what one of his main focuses is, and at least for me, the weblogging thing isn't about making money, so he doesn't get why I would spend all this time on it. I can understand that.
5 - Doug Mohney
Gee, the Inquirer is geared towards tech-heads, not towards warm-fuzzy self-love through publically posted personal diary entries.
Well, at least you got my first name right.
6 - Mac Diva
I'm in between you guys on this issue. I blog, but believe that the majority of the millions of blogs out there are horrid. And, I do have a USB drive on my keychain and will be moving from 802.11b to 802.11g when I buy a new computer. (Floppies? Haven't used'em since Apple gave them the heave-ho. Went to FireWire drives and never looked back. Zip? Sold that sucker on eBay a couple years ago.) If I were a reporter writing about weblogs, I would focus on the positive as well as the negative. But, I would not kowtow to people's "I do it, so the entire thing is great," sensibilities. I would be all over what a wonderful writer and researcher John Marshall is, but make it very clear he is not the norm.
7 - Anita Campbell
Doug, Sorry if we touched a nerve, but obviously you touched one with some of us.
Keep an open mind about blogs and explore them further.
Blogs cover a huge variety of topics. Not all blogs are about personal stuff -- blogs can be about politics, business, science, medicine, law, war and peace. And even the ones about personal stuff can be howlingly funny, uplifting, or have penetrating social insight.
Go exploring, and you just might find some of them very interesting and worthwhile.
My Best,
Anita
8 - John Mudd
This guy doesn't deserve an apology. If he had a clue about the blogosphere, he would have realized there would be some sort of backlash when he wrote his piece.
Now when you search for him in Google, guess what probably comes up first?
I wonder...
The First Amendment allows me to criticize a columnist if I desire. I have exercised that right. I'm sure most bloggers would agree.
9 - John Mudd
If he wants to control anything written here at Blogcritics, I'm fairly certain he would be warmly welcomed as a contributor, and he would likely learn quite a bit about the blogging world in the process.
10 - Phillip Winn
Amusingly, I've always thought of the Inquirer as like a blog, but slightly less personal (and less interesting) than say, Gizmodo. Sorry, I'm a Register fan. 8^P
Still, original news sources like Inquirer are still needed and appreciated, and I certainly don't spend any time reading, say, Xanga or LiveJournal sites that don't belong to family members.
As is often the case, Doug appears to be identifying blogs as a whole as journals, which make up a significant subset (by quantity, if not by number of readers) of weblogs. While I spend much more time readings blogs than I do major news sources (like the Inquirer, actually a decent source for geeks like me), I read almost zero "journal" sites like Doug describes.
Doug, since you appear to be floating around the comments section here, I suggest that you take a look at the high number of popular weblogs that have little or nothing to do with what Bob ate for dinner. If nothing else, they make for better reading than vegascommando.com and are no more defunct than interestingtimes.com! <grin>
11 - Phillip Winn
John (#8-9), why the hate? Doug suggested that the bloom will fade from the blogging rose in 2004. Let's check back in about a year to see if that's true.
Nobody's suggesting that you can't say whatever you want, but Google's first link for his name as I post this comment is to a critical response to something he wrote back in 1999, something that was actually pretty accurate then and nearly so now, almost five years later. If you want to be authoritative on someone, you have to be aware that people who've been writing on the web for a while are going to tend to have plenty of links to them already, and um, it would help to spell his name right. Having the wrong name in the title of your page isn't going to help its PageRank any. <grin>
Nobody wants to comment on the propensity of weblogs to clutter search results, or contain post after post of personal information useless to all but the poster's closest family and friends? Nobody?
12 - John Mudd
Remember, what's clutter to one may be treasure to another. ;)
13 - Mac Diva
I'll take the bait. Blogs do just that, and to top it off, many of those blogs are abandoned. Furthermore, the current life of a cache at Google is about 100 days, according to Wired. But, with the rate blog entries are proliferating, that will likely be reduced, making searches even more unreliable. Possibly, the best thing that could happen to blogs, for these and other reasons, is a winnowing process, with the better bloggers staying.
14 - TDavid
I say that this article citing bloggers as "losers" is likely referring to those who won't be here five years from now. I intend to be, assuming my heart is still beating, though I can't say for sure that my blog will be called a blog or that it will be in the same format that it is in currently.
Evolution. I think that's what it is called on the web.
My guess is these "blogs" or whatever the functions of the websites are called at that time will not fit the criteria of this author's comments. I'm speaking about those who are just as passionate five years from today as they are today (in their comments).
I host a radio show every Friday on the technical side of the business on the web and I've been trying to encourage webmasters to start blogs for longer than this site has been in existence, and I think it's still something that hasn't completely caught on with most serious online business people.
Yes, more and more are getting on board, and I'm not saying that serious business people aren't blogging now, because of course there are. However it is still too early to call it a huge success or label it a "winner". I wouldn't say that it is a "loser" though either. I'd probably label it as "growing."
Many webmasters seem to be very wary about starting and/or working a blog because of so many other things people have tried out (guestbooks, messageboards, etc) that have been work to maintain.
As for Dear Diary blogs? Well, if it was from somebody that I was interested in (loved one, family member, friend, celebrity figure) maybe I'd check it out, but frankly the blogs I'm most interested in are blogs where I can learn about new technology or opinions of new technology or find interesting/useful ways to integrate technology or art into our family of websites.
And for entertaining reading, I enjoy review sites like epinions and blogs like blogcritics.
So maybe blogs are a loser in one author's opinion from a business perspective (?), but we won't know for sure if blogs as a whole will be a loser until a few years have come and gone and see the true impact they've had on the business side of the web.
15 - John Mudd
Very, very well said. You know, maybe The Inquirer should consider giving you a column.
16 - Mobile Blogging
with Memsen Click and Share Ultra Wideband keychains mobile blogging is now possible...sharing your thoughts and comments on the fly...
17 - Big Time Patriot
I have to admit that I'm not sure what I will do with my blog once George Bush is out of office, it's devolved into a pretty one subject blog.
But my writing skills are getting better from practice (not that I would call my writing GOOD yet), maybe blogging will help increase the intellectual level of America just by having more people practicing writing and trying to explain ideas...