Anti-weblog
March 19th, 2004 • General
Being busy with yet another CMS project for one of clients, I didn’t have the chance to add anything to my blog. Spent a lot of head-scratching time trying to figure out what should I post about, after all, I wouldn’t like my blog to become one of the “I love my pet cat” kind of thing.
So I started browsing Google for some subjects, mostly things related to blogs, and I stumbled upon some articles about people who really hate bloggers and blogging, they don’t even recognize the word Blog.
The reaction may vary from someone to another, for instance James A C Joyce on Kuro5hin takes it to an extreme claiming that MovableType must die!, Bones (I’m not very sure about the name), writes a lengthy article about Why He Fucking Hates Weblogs!. Now although the name of Bones’ article implies some hostility, it’s generally constructive criticism to a lot of blog authors, and to some extent, he’s right, a lot of blogs are just pointless, absolute non-sense, not that mine is not :) . To illustrate this, “The dullest blog in the world” is a very good example of what a blog shouldn’t be.
Personally, I think a blog can be a very useful utility for authors. Unlike the 90’s homepages with cheesy background MIDI music and tons of flashing animated GIFs, a blog can be used to track the development of software projects, give designers pieces of advice (like mezzoblue), communication between musicians and fans, etc. That sense of progression that regular readers is the whole point, people like to read new things, feel they’re engaged in one way or another, and most of them are already sick from registering in NY Times just to read an article they’ve been referred to (but I’ll keep the joy of ranting about it until later).
I’ve seen a lot of blogs come and go, and they go not because of lack of content, believe me, there’s enough content in these blogs that would fill tons of printed books. But they mostly go because of their content’s quality. Take Joel On Software for example, his blog isn’t updated very often, but the kind of content he posts is really worth reading, he got people interested enough to even be happy to read about his personal life, trust me on that one. Just as a side note, I asked Joel about his opinion on those anti-weblogs articles, and here’s the discussion.
I’m not sure if there’s anything more to say, I just ask bloggers to think twice before they post their entries, after all, it’s a matter of quality rather than quantity.