Blogging – what I don’t get.
21:02 Tuesday 20 Dec 05
I thought that blogging was something that would bring unfettered publishing to us – the masses. It would give us a voice, somewhere to laugh, yell, praise and abuse. It would be chaotic yet in that chaos it would be a wonderful thing because of the lack of structure. And yet it’s being pushed into order, into boxes, categories tags and everything needs to be classified. Why ? Why are things like micro-formats being pushed, tags praised and structured blogging being seen as the ‘in thing’ ? Surely this all tries to put order where there is none and none may be wanted.
I couldn’t give a flying one about all that stuff. Why ? Because I just blog. That is all I want to do. I can see that if you have a specific interest (a tech blog, a sushi blog) that certain methods of blogging may come in useful to you, but because of all the noise about this, it’s raising the bar to blogging. I see comments such as “I don’t know how to blog” – that’s not the fault of the person saying that – it’s the fault of what we call the ‘blogosphere’ having and pushing these notions and making it seem like the default.
It isn’t.
It just doesn’t matter. Structured blogging. I can see that being used by sploggers. Tags – who cares ? Web2.0 – it’s all hot air. Sheep. That’s what many people pushing this junk want us to be – sheep. They want us to ‘embrace’ their methods – and probably just so that they can sell out later and in doing so sell your data.
If weblogs are about personal publishing, then I fail to see how these approaches do anything but make it impersonal.
1
I think not. As Seth points out, the #1 blog in the world has 25 ads. #2 only has 1. #1 makes more money from ads, wich is good for them and doesn’t hurt their readers a bit. Blogs are cool because anyone can publish, with few constraints . Not because they’re ad free. Email spam, which everyone hates, is bad because it’s horrible. It’s irrelevant, completely bogus, stupid, and often offensive. People I barely know often send me email jokes — sometimes they’re actually hilarious and
04:53 Wednesday 21 Dec 05
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I dunno, Tags are a more “organic” way of organising things. I can see how they apply. The same can be true of some microformats – standard forms mean easier communication.
I agree though – I keep seeing things about the profitability of blogging, and I think “wow.. sounds familiar” because it sounds very much like the hot air about something being “internet enabled” in the late 90′s.
Not that this is exactly another bubble, but there is a lot of hype and “oh this will be great for business” bullshit around.
01:16 Wednesday 21 Dec 05
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You wrote: “I can see that if you have a specific interest (a tech blog, a sushi blog) that certain methods of blogging may come in useful to you”. And, if you don’t have those interests, there is no need to use any methods but the ones you like. It’s all about user choice. Different tools for different folk.
I am rather surprised by your suggestion that I am pushing Structured Blogging because I want people to be like “sheep.” What we’re trying to do is provide tools for those who want them — and there are many that do. Of course, there will be many who don’t. No one is forced to use the Structured Blogging tools… We’ve made these tools open-source and free. We’ve spent a great deal of time and effort on building them and incorporated a great deal of user input. Why is it so difficult to believe that we might just not be evil?
bob wyman
15:56 Thursday 22 Dec 05