Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Blogs

Excuse me whilst I meta-post for a moment. I realize how absurd it is to blog on a blog about blogging. So get all the chuckles out now because I'm going to get serious in a moment.

I don't particularly care for blogs. I think for the most part they are all terrible and worthless. That isn't to say some blogs aren't interesting. I think in theory blogs are fine. I can appreciate someone keeping an online journal. But if you do, please for the love of God keep it to yourself. I don't care what you did today. I don't care that Jimmy stood you up for your movie date last weekend and you cried all the way home when your mom picked you up in her mini-van. You are 13, don't make your diary public. A critic would simply tell me not to read them. This is a fair point, but when browsing the internet you are no doubt going to run into a few. What makes it particularly hard is that when you are trying to find a decent blog you have to wade through the junk to get there. Luckily you can identify the bad ones in less then one post. To highlight my point I went on LiveJournal hit random and came back with this dribble. That is at least 95% of LiveJournal.

Now on the opposite side I will say what is good about blogs. If it isn't teenage girls blogging it is likely the authors are political pundits or middle-aged men who love their cats far too much. These aren't terrible in the normal sense, just exceptionally dry and boring. But there are the rare interesting blogs out there. Sometimes authors, designers, artists, etc keep blogs on their projects that are fun to keep up on. Ben Peek, and few others like him, write some very interesting material. Slice was a great story told through a blog for instance. Blogs can be fun if handled right. Here you can see the only blog that I actually follow. Strangely enough the blog got popular enough that they printed a book with all the entries in it.

Now let me talk about our blogs for a moment. They have been fun to say the least. I was wondering what is going to happen when the class ends. Will people still check them? Will people still write? Will people like blogging enough to make their own? My answer to the above questions are maybe, probably not, and no (respectively) While the blogs have been neat they in no way changed my opinions on blogging. I tend to think the blogs will just sit around collecting dust in the ever ebbing tides of the internet. One thing I would like to note is that the reason the blogs were so much fun in here is as follows. It is a harsh digital world out there. In order to get noticed and read on the internet you need a certain level of talent and/or commitment. In class we had a guaranteed audience. By forcing us to read each others blogs we all got to experience the thrills of online blogging. And in a way we were sheltered. Our own little corral on the internet where we were free to frolic about with each other. If we were to be let out into the rest of the internet and have to attract readers on our own I bet we all would have failed spectacularly. It would have taken some serious self-promotion on the blogger forums to convince anyone to look our way.

But that is just my opinion. What did you think about the blogs? Are you going to keep them active? Do you have a favorite blog? At any rate I think I distracted you long enough to realize what I'm trying to do here.

776/1000

1 Comments:

Blogger AKH said...

I'm on the fence about blogs and blogging in general.

I think it is a really cool way to post information, keep in contact with people, express your opinion, etc. etc. Also, the fact that you can personalize your blog however you choose, whether it is the layout or the font or the topic, makes it very cool as well. At the same time, I'm not personally a fan of blogging. I get paranoid about the whole internet predators, and internet identity theft, because I'm sure that somewhere in the world, someone could very easily break into my accounts and steal my information...not that a college student's english blog is on the top of a priority list, but whatever.

I honestly forgot about out class blogs quite a lot, especially until a few days before a tally is due which is partially why I'm writing this comment. I don't think that blogging is for me. Though I like computers and like working with computers, my knowledge is pretty limited. But I did think that doing a blog for a class assignment was a very cool idea...I've never done anything like this for a class before.

December 10, 2008 at 10:42 AM  

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