2003-05-21»
we aim only to improve quality of pagerank»My friend Cait has decided to go public with her blog. It's mostly about her pregnancy, but she has wisely started off with a long rant about blogs themselves. She says they're no different from diaries, and they're just called blogs because men don't like to admit to such female pursuits. Oh, and she thinks social software is a load of unrevelatory bunkum too, and that even if it does exist, there's more to it than blogs.
I'm linking to it mainly because I find it really funny that someone should go on about how people just endlessly talk about blogs by endlessly going on about blogs. And, you know, I should point out that people who write diaries also go on about the nature of writing diaries quite a bit. I know I did in mine - and I distinctly remember Cait doing so in her old online journal. Livejournal, similarly, is full of people talking about Livejournal. It's like Children's TV as a frequent topic amongst students; it's popular, because everyone has it in common.
And what about that whole media obsession? Well, I did a search for "blogosphere", as Cait suggests, on the BBC and Guardian sites. The BBC site has two hits. One is by Bill Thompson, poo-pooing the whole thing. On the Guardian site, there are eight hits, two of which are negative, one of which is just the name of an app, and the rest have that excited tone of people using a word they've just heard. It looks like a reasonable percentage of the people talking about blogs in the press are doing exactly what Cait's doing: going on about how much people overrate them, and how there's more to social software than that. Which is to say, Cait's complaining partly about people doing what Cait's doing right now.
The other reason I'm linking to Cait, though, is because I remember thinking similiarly when I started writing Oblomvovka. I think what changed my mind and made me more interested in their more novel aspects is the effect of being linked to, and having people comment on your pages, and seeing things you've discovered percolate around the rest of the world. That really seems distinctly different from my experience of writing diaries, and much closer to the original idea of a weblog - as a commonplace book of interesting links that you've found. It's the meeting of strangers in referers, rather than the internecine world that you meet when you just read blogs and their explicit links, that I find fun. Whatever you call them, writing a blog is a lot more fun than just reading them.
And I don't care how much I talk about that. It's my blog, I can do what I want with it. Nyahhh.