Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Ceci n'est pas un blog

(A quick Google suggests that it's "le blog" rather than "la blog", for what it's worth)

I am concerned and worried, not to mention perturbed, by the number of people who've been telling me they've been enjoying reading my blog. Now, I'm not worried that people are reading this stuff (in this competitive wired world, one person apart from the author reading a website is probably about one more than the average), and I'm delighted to hear that people have been enjoying reading it, but I am worried that the only word which can be adequately and succinctly used to describe it is as a blog.

The word "blog" has acquired too many connotations, which range all the way from the cliquey, mutual-admiration world of the blogerati (who claim to be changing the world by posting lots of links to each other's blogs telling each other how right they are), to the swirling depths of the blogosphere (a strange plane of existence almost entirely filled with near-identical and nearly-unread accounts of trips to the vet, minor housekeeping tasks, perceived personal injustices and naive political rants). Rarely have so many self-aggrandising statements been made by the advocates of a medium.

This makes me uncomfortable. The big breakthrough which blogging software was responsible for (and the excellent Movable Type, which runs this site, can undeniably be called blogging software) was that it enabled people to post linked articles on the web without having to do much worrying about HTML, and to file them away and allow people to post comments and link to items of interest in a semi-automated manner. This is certainly good for helping people produce websites that don't look like a Frontpage-generated dogs' breakfast, but revolutionary it wasn't. Refreshing, yes, but revolutionary, no.

But hype being what it is (and after the dot-com bubble burst, something new to hype was desperately needed), there are plenty of people out there who will tell you how bloggers are transforming the political scene (yes, there are some interesting political blogs out there, but I doubt that Tony Blair exactly loses sleep through having disapproving things written about him in blogs), democratising publishing (probably not - after all, everyone's been able to put stuff on the web for quite some time now without it needing to be a blog) and generally otherwise saving the world. Blogs are useful tools and some of them are often interesting, but I don't buy into the excesses of "blogging is going to kill Big Media!"-type hype that surround the blogging frenzy. People have been pamphletting and self-publishing for centuries, and this is just a new way of doing what people have been doing for a very long time.

As should be obvious now, I don't buy into the blogging hype. Yes, blogging software is pretty neat and useful for ad-hoc posting of random thoughts to the Internet (like wot I'm doing right now) and the ability to handle reader comments and links to other sites more or less out of the box is useful too, but I don't like the self-importance and mutual aggrandisement of the blogerati. What you say is what's important, not the medium in which it's published, and a well-written and thought-provoking mail message or Usenet article or standard non-blogged web page has just as much ability to change the world as a blog entry. At the opposite end of the scale, a boring piece of writing is still boring regardless of medium or the number of loyal followers the writer has. Blogging something does not automatically make it profound.

So thanks, but I'd rather not think of this as a blog. The only problem is.. what to call it instead? I think I'll settle with "website", as let's face it, that's what it is.

Posted by mpk at April 21, 2004 3:19 PM | TrackBack