Sun, 26 Mar 2006 20:37:00
On the question of what is a blog
Via Ann Althouse, here’s another elitist media “expert” telling people what blogs should be.
The best blogs, even though they sound like something you might buy for $3.99 a pound at Dean & DeLuca, aren’t supposed to be sausage. They aren’t supposed to feel processed and packaged, or appear worried-over, even by the egos from which they spring. Reasoned, syntactic arguments and short, stately essays are for newspaper op-ed pages. Wry, bleary-eyed, observational ramblings make for the most dynamic — and believable — celebrity blogs.
...
Mr. Baldwin, by contrast, in his latest “blog entry” at huffingtonpost.com, blows a mighty, stately and imploring wind — one that would be at home on any opinion page in the mainstream media. Nothing wrong with that, but then, what makes it a blog? “Help end these horrible and corrupt times in this country,” Mr. Baldwin writes. “Give your contributions to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.”
Yeesh. Might as well be an ad for the World Wildlife Fund. Even Rosie O’Donnell’s inscrutable, stream-of-consciousness postings at rosie.com capture the spirit of impromptu electronic nakedness that makes “blogging” something new and rangy and interesting.
Otherwise, it’s just sausage.
It irritates me to no end when people who never heard of weblogging before 2001-ish start writing about what blogs are supposed to be.
Some of us were blogging when there was no cute little word for it, when we had to hand-code our pages to add new content to the top, when there was no suck thing as a permalink. Some of us beta-tested Greymatter the day it was released. Some of us were among the first paying customers Pyra Labs ever had.
Here’s what a blog is: Whatever the hell you want it to be, as long as there is updated content on some kind of a regular basis, generally with the new content at the top. Comments, trackbacks, pings...all nice, all great innovations that helped create a true community, but they are NOT necessary.
Writing style means nothing. Length of individual articles means nothing. Subject matter means nothing. Your blog can be nothing but ads for products. Nothing but recipes with no editorial content whatsoever. Your blog can be nothing but pictures of your kids, postcards sent in by random people, snarks on Britney Spears...there is no limit to what your blog can be.
If it’s published, on the web and is a log of whatever material you choose to post, then it is a weBLOG. I hate to break it to Mr. Zeller here, but all blogging is sausage-making at its best and worst. I can count on one hand the number of blogs I have seen that are finished, polished, “professional-grade” writing. We are all making sausage at Satriale’s in the blogosphere.
That goes for idiots like Alec Baldwin as well. You may not like it, and I don’t, but HuffPo is a blog. Each entry, however it is crafted, is a blog entry. Get over it and stop trying to put everyone in a little box you can easily label. So he pimps for his causes. We all do it. We’ve all asked our readers to do something, support something, give to someone somewhere at one time or another.
What a shock, by the way, this stupid article comes from the New York Times. How the mighty have fallen…
Posted by JimK at 08:37 PM on March 26, 2006
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Categories: The Blogosphere, The Fourth Estate
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#1 Posted by JeremiahB
on 03/27 at 05:45 AM -
That’s just great. So now I have to get some blogging software, find some hosting, AND get my blog approved by this bitch.
I’d like to discuss PHP and css with this expert, I’m sure there’s much I could learn.