There’s now more than 60 million blogs on the Internet, according to the online blog-tracking website Technorati.com. It’s hard to tell just how accurate that number is, since blog-tracking technology is still in its infancy, but it’s safe to say there’s a lot. Sixty million blogs, and all of them are terrible. (By the end of this column I’ll have said “blog” so many times the word will lose all meaning.)
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past five years, a “blog,” short for weblog, is basically an online journal in which people chronicle some topic of interest to them. Although blogs have been around for a while, they’re often lumped in with sites such as YouTube.com and MySpace.com as part of the “Web 2.0” phenomenon. That means you can watch that old episode of Sesame Street where Mr. Hooper dies on YouTube, while simultaneously posting about it on your blog and uploading naked pictures to send to the sexually ambiguous girl you met through MySpace.
Nowadays, there’s a blog for everything. There are political blogs like the Huffington Post, celebrity gossip-rag blogs like Perez Hilton, even blogs from U.S. soldiers in Iraq. I’m sure most people have at least one or two friends who painstakingly maintain a blog that nobody reads. You can’t avoid it.
The main problem with blogs is that anybody can write anything. This is when you get 2,000-word treatises on why Janice’s dog dislikes plums, or why Steve is in a bad mood because his girlfriend overcooked the pot roast. There’s a reason that diaries are generally considered to be personal, private things — because nobody but you cares about any of this stuff. The Internet is littered with this type of self-indulgent tripe. The quality of the writing usually runs the gamut of “barely cogent” to “borderline dyslexic,” but if you’re an armchair psychologist, there’s usually enough social dysfunction in the first paragraph to make a kind of heuristic diagnosis as to what the problem is. MySpace and blogging have sort of merged in this respect, since MySpace allows users to post blogs on their profile. The downside is that nobody reads them except ex-boyfriends/girlfriends who are stalking you.
But the diary blogs are generally just dumb and innocuous. Worse are what I like to refer to as the “specialist” blogs — blogs that deal particularly with a single topic, like flyfishing or beekeeping. Often, these kind of blogs are run by bitter, vindictive hermits who either couldn’t make it in their field and find joy in pointing out the slightest faults of their contemporaries or deluded souls who believe they’re brilliant and that everyone will want to read their five-part dissertation on Cassavetes’s use of color in his films. Reading these is not so much infuriating as it is sad, sort of like hearing a crazy guy ranting about the end of the world on a street corner. It may seem like a lot of people are listening, but really everyone is just ignoring you and kind of feeling sorry for you.
The problem with all this documentation is there’s just so much of it, it’s hard to separate the few useful blogs from the millions of useless boring diary entries. Sure, there are websites like Technorati that filter the most popular blogs, but if I’ve learned anything from my many years on the Internet, it’s that people like stupid things. Thinking about it, I’m not sure there’s any sort of blog I’d be particularly interested in, short of a blog that does nothing except post naked pictures of Scarlett Johansson and coupons for free beer. Maybe someone could make a humorous blog, poking fun at the Bush administration. I don’t think that’s been done before.
For the record, there actually are blogs dedicated to beekeeping and flyfishing (as if there was ever any doubt). Check out this excerpt from the flyfishing blog at blogs.thenewstribune.com/fish:
Where: Puget Sound
Conditions: Windy . . . very windy . . . and rainy, too. đ
When: Saturday
Flies used: Puget Sound: Brown over white, pink over white and olive over white clousers
Song of the day: “Crawling In the Dark,” Hoobastank (I can’t seem to upload a video right now, so please bear with me!)
“I hear it’s going to be nasty this weekend.”
“Yeah, but do they mean rainy nasty or windy and rainy nasty?”
“I don’t know-are you going to try to fish in this?”
“Yup.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Yup.”
I looked out the window on Saturday morning. It was indeed rainy but there wasn’t a lot of rain.
Move over, Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea has got some competition.
The thing I dislike most about blogs is that they’re just somebody’s opinion. And really, who wants to read the misguided opinions of some loser on the Internet? That’s why we have newspapers.
Adan Berkowitz, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at [email protected].