Blogging is stupid

"Anything can be appropriate when you know what you're doing" - Wenham's 2nd Law

Blogs are great for active projects

Nothing makes a project stagnate faster than the lack of milestones and something that quantifiably shows how much you've already done. Also, nothing makes it harder to join a project if there's no narration of the project's history to help you get up to speed.

Big software projects need a blog. Large building construction projects need a blog. Collaborative book writing projects need a blog. Feedback-driven service development needs a Blog. What would be really kick-ass is if most blog postings were automatically generated, so the project workers can focus on the project. Those postings ought to be editable, however, to put in the kind of narrative voice a machine can't simulate.

Blogs are an Input Queue

A team-developed web site can use a blog as a private or public input queue that gets "drained" regularly by other members who turn the postings into complete pages and link them up to the existing text. Very active wikis or wiki articles that track real-time phenomena can use a blog to break out the problem of entering frequent updates and integrating those changes into a canonical body of text without running into the file-locking problem.

The text produced by the team stands on its own, while the Input-Queue style blog is left as an appendix for those who are frequent visitors and need to know what changes have been made.

To avoid messing up a search engine with duplicate content, the Input-Queue blog can be listed as a "NOINDEX" page with meta tags or a robots.txt file.

Blogs can serve the same purpose a diary does

Private, semi-private, and to a lesser degree public blogs can be used for the therapeutic, cathartic and esteem-building effects we use diaries for. In this case they really are nothing more than an electronic diary, and call them a "blog" if you really get your rocks off that way. A private and semi-private (friends-only) blog like the kind afforded by Livejournal may give you something that fills a need in your personal life. But whatever you do, don't get carried away with the urge to turn it into some kind of news commentary vehicle, or you'll become One Of Them.

Blogs can track an unfolding news event

Creating a new blog dedicated to a specific unfolding news event can provide valuable historical perspective on what are, quite often, highly complex stories. By this I'm thinking of something like a Tsunami Blog, a Katrina Blog, a [Insert Country Here] Military Coup Blog, and so-on. These would be created in the early stages of the event, would stick to the topic, ought to be writable by either anyone or a group of people (to increase its chances of success as an authoritative tracker), and would NOT try to evolve into a general commentary blog. Blogs are cheap to make. Make one for every color in the rainbow, and use "Blogrolls" to connect them to related events and the authors who maintain them.

Current-events blogs can also be Input Queues.

Blogs can give a guy a chance

A certain tailor appears to be making out like gangbusters after starting a blog. Well if it puts dosh in your pocket, then what do you care what I think about blogging? Having an accessible personality helps business, but only businesses that have personality. Tailors in today's world of mass produced and made-to-fit rags can not only afford to have a personality, but must, and this is probably true of a lot of professions. But the majority of those professions are the craftsman type, not the corporate type, and much of what's best to write about in their blogs will be unessential, forgettable, ephemeral stories that have a strong human interest to help their customers identify with the human being they're buying from.

Blogs can use up excess empty space on server hard drives

Magnetic particles, if given nothing to do, can turn into degenerates and wander around the surface of the platters causing trouble. A few thousand blogs should lock them up in superficially purposeful states of orientation. I suggest registering a domain name that implies free blog accounts, installing some cheap blogging software, and writing the sign-up URL on some shopping-mall bathroom stalls. In a few months you'll have swarms of teenagers helping you to organize undedicated magnetic particles. And since nobody reads the archives, you'll be able to delete as much as you want whenever you need the space again for something important.

last updated 3 years ago #