Friday, August 05, 2005
Blogging has lost it. I mean, really.
A long, long, time ago (like in 2003) blogging was a blissfully unknown practice, exclusive to our little circles of blogs, whereby links to our friends' blogs were limited to a humble 10. Everyone updated it every day, not because we knew thousands of people would read it, but for the sake of that little circle of 10 (or 20, or 30) friends who'd visit and read it religiously, and perhaps leave some comments at the bottom of the post. Remember those? Where visitors' comments were limited to the actual CONTENT of that particular post, and perhaps the occasional "Hey! Nice blog! Interesting posts you have here.. could i like you?" comments.
Back then, blogging had purpose, bloggers spent every effort trying to phrase each sentence into a beautifully crafted post. Blogs were extremely useful in glorifying the mundane, and exaggerating the little gripes of life. They were the updating tools for long lost secondary school friends, topics of discussion of those you see in school everyday, and avenues of bitching about those you hated and knew were reading it. I marvelled how certain bloggers were able to eloquently shape their posts and longed to blog like them. The best reads were those full of anguish, or with some form of political agenda.
2005 saw the crumbling of that seemingly untouchable niche. I dont exactly know what happened, but blogging has degenerated into the realms of "commonhood", in the very ranks of MSN (ugh), ICQ (double ugh) and IRC (huh?). I suppose it is us, the very bloggers who started it all, who've destoryed this beautiful craft with our blind ambition for more links and readers in our delusion that people actually DO visit our blogs because they care about our lives.
Then came the "blogereties" which is such a big phenomenon now, not to mention a blogging conference, COLLEGE-wide blogs, and a blogger writing for a newspaper column? Oh phu-leeze, doesnt everyone see that these are the very contradictions of what a blog is supposed to be: an online journal where you can effectively express (more or less politically correct) feelings with an exclusive readership?
Then again, these people did no crime but to blog well; they were the very people i envied when i first started blog-surfing. But the whole writing for newspaper thing is really pushing it (and as everyone knows, when u cant express your in-your-face blog views in a newspaper, it just gets, how do you put it, boring.) and a blogging conference is just contradictory to the "personalism", if there is such a word, of our blogs.
That aside, let's talk about popularity and the crap it brings. 'Course, everyone wants a piece of the action, and everyone thinks they're REALLY interesting. All hail the arrival of that dreaded publication, The Event Blog. Always equipped with a detailed (read: boring) description of the day's events, supplemented with a few blurred clubbing photos with pimply friends, and they believe that's called blogging. Suddenly everyone's a writer.
Ugh. Let's get our act together. Things that were meant to be read by the whole world are under the catagory: Publications and Websites. Blogs are, well, blogs. Let's not desecrate this fine art any further now, shall we? I'll start by hiding that horrendous visitor counter on the right. Does it matter how many readers i get?
There, i've done my part.
he rocked the party at 9:19 AM |
