Blogging is stupid

1. Blogging inhibits the discoverability of information. There are now many people, experts in their field, who are pouring their knowledge into the Internet soup. That's the part which is good. But the fact that most of them are using Blogs to do so means thir work is harder for their audience to find. So many blogs put the burden on search engines to do what the author could have done more efficiently instead, and it means that the revolution in information access is not in the blog, but in the web spider. That's the part which is bad, because good spiders are few, and the few are not under our control.

2. Blogs encourage updates that aren't needed. The emphasis on updates is what blogs are all about, and that emphasis is created by prominent timestamps, the reverse-chronological order of articles, and the use of calendars as the default way of navigating archives. Everything about the design of the blog puts a pressure on the blog author to update compulsively, and that way encourages behavior that destroys the status of more worthy postings, and destroys the quality of the blog. Each unnecessary update pushes your best work off the front page and into the fathomless obscurity of a blog's archives. Every compuslive update reduces the writer's talent by half. Good ideas deserve their own sites, and Epiphanies take time. Forcing them to come just so you can satisfy the short attention span of your uncaring audience will destory you.

3. Blogs are a pattern, not a theory. Blogs are certainly a design pattern in the Alexanderian sense, and can be mixed with many other patterns to produce a web site that has The Quality Without A Name. They are not a governing theory, however, and fail when used as the only foundation for a web site. When a blog is used as the only feature of a web site, it's like having a house made of patios and no bedrooms.

4. Blogs affect an unhealthy narcissistic attitude. One can spend a lifetime listing all of the blogs that happily remain focused on their topic, but our complaint is about how the blog culture focuses on the use of blogs as a personal extension. Finding avenues to express yourself is healthy, but the contemporary view of blogs make the blog author the focus, not what the author talks about. Blog culture is not about discarding the assumption that it's "all about us", blogs are really all about Me Me Me. A decade ago, Lisa Goldstein wrote a prophetic short story called The Narcissus Plague, where a virus causes a near shut-down of society from people rendered incompetent by their desire to talk about themselves. This story was written in 1994, but if you read the dialogue from plague-infected individuals in the story, you might notice an uncanny resemblance to the modern blog's prose. The blogging phenomena hasn't shut down society the way the Plague does in Goldstein's story, but it is starting to shut down people's social lives now that bloggers expect you to read their blog, instead of actually telling you in person about what's happening in their life.

5. Blogs ruin the art of conversation on the Internet. This is about more than just the fact that a blog's graphic design gives the owner's words vastly more prominence than people who respond with comments. And it's not just about the thousands of different blog hosts that cumilatively force you to create dozens of new accounts over and over again just to leave comments. And it's not just about the fact that many blogs don't allow comments at all, which means that someone who doesn't already have a blog must go to the length of creating one if they want to respond to someone else's post. And it's not just about how pathetic blogs are at keeping track of the thread of a conversation that has just gone "cross-blog", even with Backlinks and Trackbacks. And nor is it just about the fact that with thousands of separate blog hosts and blog installations, no single reader can keep their own "killfile" or use their own anti-spam software. And it ain't only about the fact that so many blog posts get linked to from half a dozen community sites such as Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. that all have their own commenting system and consequently lead to a bizarre and untrackable balkanization of any dialogue that tries to condense around the post.

It's all that, and the catastrophic loss of gestalt. There once was a perfectly good technology for tracking thousands of conversations, threading them intelligently, treating every post with the same prominence as the thread originator, maintaining a killfile and anti-spam solution unique to the needs of each reader and effective on any post at all, requiring only one log-in to respond to any thread, and having a single User Interface to read and post with.

It was called Usenet. Fortunately it still exists, and is now easier than ever to use. Unfortunately it means bloggers will be trapped behind this "blog iron curtain" where the discussions can never cross over from one zone to another.

6. Blogs put good information in jeopardy. Such an intense popularity and ease-of-use has led to the use of blogs as a way to disseminate useful information, often exclusively (see item #1). But most blogs are hosted under highly precarious conditions. Homemade servers with no backups, mass-hosting sites operated by companies with unproven longevity, hundreds of proprietary formats (and a pair of syndication standards who's creators and cheerleaders evangelize rabidly and divisively), single points of failure, and mercy to companies and individuals with an agenda to fulfill. These conditions are more fragile than the ways mankind has developed to secure information before, like books and magazines with thousands of copies, and public-domain repositories that are copied to endless media types and formats. If Wikipedia's servers were wiped out tomorrow, there'd still be thousands of copies of the database it makes available for download to anyone.

7. Blogging will not change the world, except, perhaps, for the worse. The political influence of blogs is being quickly consumed by their own virtues of cheapness and ease-of-use; political and commercial groups can flood the Internet with just as much crap as a legion of honest and dedicated bloggers could do the opposite. The reader has to spend more effort to discover an objective voice than she would on in a more communally edited medium.

8. Blogs are the new Geocities. People are now screening URLs for the word "blog" like they used to screen for "tripod", "geocities" and the tilde.

9. This item was flooded-off the Manifesto by the 7.8 quadra-mega-ulti-fantasti-billi-trilli-quintilli-pillion blog postings made in the last five minutes. A twelve-mile section of highway, four small villages, and a nature preserve were obliterated in a violent torrent of paper when somebody accidentally commanded his PC to print every page referenced in the weblogs.com updates.xml file on a high-speed commercial Lexmark line printer. Surviving eyewitnesses said the "Shockwave Of Crap" was more stunning than the apocalypse dream-sequence of Terminator 2. Elsewhere, five hardcore spammers were compelled to flee their bulk-email business and take refuge in Bora-Bora when threatened with the entire output of Myspace.com. A sixth was subdued by doctors after spending several hours screaming "like the terrified guy in Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon".

10. When the author of this page loaded Weblogs.com to verify some details reported in item #9, the top-most blog listed was called "Depressed". Among other titles indicative of overall blog quality were #23 ("my dog is an asshole, part II"), #26 ("Fuck Off!!!"), and #27 ("divorce"). One was actually titled "♪(((¯'·×·«¤´¯·.»¤ⓜ€мØЯΊÅ§ Ðξ ЦлĄ Þ®ĮИ¢∑$@¤«.·´¯`¤»·×·'´¯)))ﺕ™", which is either an embedded computer virus or was meant to, like, so totally blow away Andrew Kowalski's blog from 9th grade that nobody else in school will have a blog so awesome. The best blogs on the Internet, all two of them, were last visited in 1998. Police have no leads.

11. Back-patting is ugly. "Narcissism" just might be the word that critics grow tired of having to use, but it's difficult to speak of the general attitude of blogging with any other term. Perhaps because of the effect discussed in #4, blogging's major topic of choice is... blogging. The blogging community has bathed itself in an undeserved sense of utopianism, and its impressive intellectual resources have been excited to praise blogs as if they were as good as penicillin or atomic power. They aren't. They're as revolutionary as a new sanding technique.

12. Blogs are the only hobby that doesn't pay off. Once you've blown away your first couple of weekends, made your girlfriend look elsewhere for attention, and made people you don't know hate you, you find out that nobody really cared just how hard you worked to scour 29 RSS feeds for a scrap of news that 3.243563434334E+120 other bloggers didn't already catch and linkjack anyway.

13. Bloggers actually get outraged if you don't give them credit for finding a link. Not putting in a "via"-credit is now considered bad manners. Our interpretation of this new attitude is that blogging offers so little value-added for the reader that bloggers must fight over credit for trivialities. Word-of-Mouth has now been monetized.

14. Blogging develops a skill at the expense of a talent. After doing it for a while, some bloggers realize their typing and English skills have improved. Their typing speed has increased and their spelling prowess has advanced. Some might even buy a copy of Strunk & White and fix their grammar. But when great writers have honed their talent by writing essays and books, bloggers hone theirs by quipping on headlines and ephemeral controversies. The heroin of blogging is a link from a high-traffic site, and because A-listers and community link-fests all score their links highest when it's topical or popular, Bloggers are learning to pander to crass politics, pop culture, and shock. What could have been a talent is sacrificed for opportunity, and the result is that Bloggers will rarely create a masterpiece, and instead learn only how to comment on somebody else's.

15. Come on. COME ON. Blogs are stupid.

last updated 2 years ago #