Blogus Protectus
December 5, 2008 by Jerry
Filed under Arts & Entertainment
I have a bad habit, I guess, of leaving toast crumbs in the butter dish. For me, it was kind of a cathartic ashes to ashes thing. My wife didn’t see it that way. But with a simple agreement that I would be more mindful of my technique for making toast, I was deftly able to avoid the inherent pitfalls of his-and-hers butter.
So now tell me, do I have here the makings of an interesting blog , or is it little more than the fluid ramblings of a wannabe columnist ? Blogs. Blogging. What is that? What does that mean, “blogging?” And who thinks this stuff up ? And why ?
If you ask me, it’s a revolt of the Internet plebe, against those royalty who spend their lives seeing code as poetry. The real men and women of the Internet who understand “real” HTML pages, and the on-the-fly translation between email protocols and web formats. A few years ago, “bloggers” turned to an ever increasing number of servers offering free Blog space and software. Now they could put up their pages within minutes and begin to write, edit, compose and generally take on the world, in the same amount of time it took to create the bare shell of one “real” web page. Of course nothing with the sophistication of a full blown 500 page website, but nevertheless something that could be looked upon as a platform to disseminate information. And disseminate they have.
There is no end to the amount of useless information on the Internet today, it’s just easier to find a lot more of it. Millions upon millions of web pages, precious gigabytes of golden bandwidth wasted on creative nonsense.
I say no matter how sophisticated the delivery platform, there will never be a substitute for professional journalism, which comes with training, with experience, with credibility, with developing trust based on the accuracy of a record in the field. People need an accurate and objective reference point for their information. I mean really, how can any discerning viewer not be appalled, when CNN and other news organizations try to look hip by including opinions from the “blogosphere” in their news reports — “Now let’s see what the “bloggers” have to say about this” — as if “bloggers” constituted some separate sphere of intelligence. Insane.
Frankly, I’m suspicious of this whole blogs, and blogger thing, and I dismiss the idea of Web 2.0 out of hand, except with respect to relevant software, of which there is little. Mini-resumes, and “comments” as sources of referral traffic and revenue, remind me of the Internet boom back in the late ’90s when for a time, stock price was based not on company profits, but the number of website hits. And now we come to face the inevitable demise of the avatar and the emergence of the video comment, where individuals will simply shout their annoyances at you, instead of typing in ALL CAPS.
Oh, the humanity.
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