I'm going to try and explain my loathing of blogs. No, 'loathing' is the wrong word, what I feel is a sort of mix between antipathy and despair. The people who know me know that I've pretty much always hated blogs. At first they, and I, just assumed it was because I saw it as a fad, and I hate fads. Or just that I was being curmudgeonly or grumpy or reactivist or just an asshole. But as more and more people got blogs I got more an more agitated. Some figures I collated a while back put the number of blogs at around 500,000. With approximatley 248 million web users that means that 1 in 500 people has a blog. It wasn't that it was tripe - self indulgent drivel with nary a gem among the coals - I've defended vanity pages and domains before because it is useful to just have people brain dumping and spewing information and the sticking it up somewhere. You'll be grateful when you're searching for ways to get a win modem working under linux on your cheapo czech pc clone or trying to find a list of every ship name in Iain Banks' Culture novels or looking for somebody who's cured their rare andaluvian flowering orchid from Bertlesman's Black Beetle infestation. So is it Live Journal style angst? This example was taken from a post to a list a long time ago when I was still trying to work this out : "http://www.livejournal.com/users/gothbytch/ in particular http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?itemid=10759288&nc=1 and that blog was just chosen at random from livejournal I can see why people might think it cathartic to play out their lives in front of an audience but ... /shrug/ http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?itemid=13696274 is fairly informative" But no. That's not the reason. Whilst I admit that a lot of LJ creeps me out and I don't really understand why people feel the need to write a private journal an then publish it I do understand the power of community, and that's what LJ is. So, no. That's not the reason why I hate blogs. Even if it was then only a smallish proportion of blogs are LiveJournal types blogs. ... scratch head. have cup of tea. think ... Sun Tzu says that to defeat an enemy you must understand them. To understand the enemy you must first define them. So how do we define a blog? In short - we can't. The term is almost meaningless. It's wirthless. It's hype, it's a brand, it's an empty buzzword bandied around by the media and by people who don't want to say "I write stuff sometimes and stick it on my web site". It's not a 'sequentially or chronologically or regularly updated website' because that would include everything from the BBC news site, to the travel web sites to Slashdot to my site. 'Online Journal'? Not all of them are journals, some of them seem to e link aggregators. Hmm, getting somewhere, come back to that later. Everybody knows a blog when they see one so, in vaguest possible handwavy type way, you can define a blog by its attitude. What that attitude is I'll leave up to the reader's discretion. And it's what that attitude tends to be that I think irritates me. And it's tied in with link and content aggregation. Places like Slashdot, or Gagpipe aggregate content - specifically "news for nerds, stuff that matters" and links to satirical articles on the web respectively. But, blogs, from what I can see suck in content almost indiscriminately and make no attempt to organise that content logically or promote it properly. In short they hoard data which I find an anathema. Worse than that they cross link to each other presenting a homogenized, incestuous web of self congratulation and group promotion, kind of like the Masons but without the leather aprons. Instead of providing a new and exciting publishing revolution which promises to break free of the shackles of the media conglomerates the system actually promotes (whether by intent, design, inherent flaw or by accident) a keiretsu of jocks and cheerleaders with high profile blogs to which all information must flow to be validated surrounded by a ziggurate of obsequious peons all with their own blogs which nobody visits because the information on them is too dilute to actually make it worthwhile. Basically, blogging, despite what it set out to do, has actually created out of town supermarkets which flog prepackaged, inferior quality memes at the expense of the high street butchers and farm shops which are slowly being killed off. ... Oh dear, I appear to have exchanged angry ranting and swearing for melodrama and bad metaphors. ************* NOTES resisting of aggregation and pressure to write an entry a day to maintain the brand.