Saturday, January 22, 2005

Blog, blog, bloggity-blog, yada yada yada

Enough, already.

No, really. Enough.

Here's a blog about blogs from one of the more influential political bloggers. Here's a book about blogs from the most fantastically boring and banal of bloggers. Here's an article about the blogosphere from (arguably) its biggest rockstar (and the guy who wants me dragged off to Camp Six).

What the hell is up with this narcissistic/solipsistic orgy of self-appraisal? Some of it is self-congratulatory. Some of it is agonized and wracked with doubt. But really, folks ... come on! The November election is still visible in the rear-view mirror and all that bloggers seem to want to talk about is whether blogging had an effect on it.

Well, yeah, it did. So?

When I was in sixth grade, I produced an underground student newspaper. Six sheets of white bond, five sheets of carbon paper and my mom's typewriter. A blog is nothing but that old typewriter, only plugged into the whole world instead of six kids at Maplecrest Elementary.

Sure, blogs and blogging are cool. But they're just method, not content. And this inward focus is no different than (and no more interesting than) some 18th-century typesetter's nail-biting over whether his new 12-point set would catch on. He wasn't Gutenberg, and bloggers aren't either. They're just writers. Some of them are very good writers, but the fact that they publish via blog isn't especially noteworthy. The "gee whiz" era that blogging would fall under is over. Blogging is just simplified web publishing, and we stopped oohing and ahhing over that six or seven years ago.

Has blogging changed things? To a degree, yes. But not so much that an orgy of introspection is called for. Let's get back to blogging about ... stuff!

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