It’s probably fair to say that there is an element of the online population who feel that the recent explosion of weblogs and the publicity it has recieved is undue. Furthermore, it has emerged that All Webloggers Are Teenage Girls.
Well, Most of them.
Well, Most of them that live in poland.
Well, most of them that live in poland and filled out the survay.
I was going to start this article as “There are two types of weblogs in this world” and divide the world into Them (The webloggers who are, as Andrew carefully and elequently describes, a bunch of sixteen year old pop-idol fans gazing at their navels whilst describing how great the macaroni and cheese they had for dinner last night was) verses Us (The cool, level headed Webloggers, who discuss new W3C standards and the direction of them; the future of weblogging; the whys and wherefores of XML development and such), before I did something that stopped me doing this. I read my archives. So I ask this instead:
What is a weblog?
It’s a collection of articles displayed in descending chronological order on the front page, normally archived by month or week. Easy. Does that stop FTrain being a kind of weblog? Not really. Does that make The Register a weblog? Probably not. So, we have these weblog things, where we can safely define Weblogs as “Something I think is a weblog”, and that’s about it. This means that you can make something a weblog by putting it on the web and saying “This is a weblog”, and since weblogs are currently Cool, an awful lot of people are putting things online and calling them weblogs.
Saying that all webloggers act like 12 year olds is rougly equivilent to saying that “All journalists are no-talent hacks with the integrity of a ball of water”. Andrew Orlowski saying that blogs are a waste of bandwidth is roughly equivlant to the classic “All Greeks Are Liars” argument, since his irregular columns are mostly a rant three folds long about whatever is on his mind at the time. But I digress, for this isn’t about attacking Andrew Orlowski.
So, ninty percent of weblogs are crap, depending on how you define weblog.
So far, so normal. Ninty percent of everything is crap. There is still the 10%, there are still people like Stavros, BB, Mark, CavLec et. al. who make wading though the rest of it worth it.
One day I’ll submit something like this to The Register to see if they print it. I doubt it.