"I simply don't think I'm able to understand the type of person who gets pleasure out of such dreary, repetitive, contentless complaining."

Hello pot, meet Mr Kettle.

→ Posted by: Waxy at July 15, 2003 9:34 AM

Count me in the "perpetually entertained" camp; this running bitchfight between you and Mr. Orlowski makes me giggle. Orlowski actually says that bloggers can't get a date in his latest article; I think the next logical level of ridicule is for to both post photoshopped pictures of each other. I suggest a simian theme.

→ Posted by: Seldo at July 15, 2003 9:37 AM

A simian theme? Pah! You can't go wrong with good old-fashioned nudity.

→ Posted by: Tim at July 15, 2003 10:21 AM

Last Sunday's Doonesbury is, I fear, quite relevant to the Orlowski vs everyone-I-think-of-as-sane debate. And funny too!
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20030713

→ Posted by: Phil at July 15, 2003 11:55 AM

Since I'll agree that last night's spool rant was fairly directionless, I've had a stab at explaining my thoughts a little more coherently at http://hitherto.net/content/writing/essays/nadb2.xml
I'm not getting as much sleep as I should right now, so it may still not be as clear as I'd like. But there you go...

→ Posted by: hitherto at July 15, 2003 1:15 PM

You know that the spool thing is just the output of an IRC channel, right?

Seems a wee bit incongruous to argue with Orlowski about his whining over imperfections in the blog 'style', and then having a rather over-long pop because people ranted in IRC. (I mean, what else is IRC *for* ?)

Aaaand, for the record, I'll register an opinion that in order to count as a blogger, Simon would really have to have made more than a half dozen entries on his site in 2 years.

→ Posted by: John H at July 15, 2003 1:40 PM

however, last night's blog discussion in the houses of p was fairly dull don't you think. did the wi-fi add anything to it other than "yippee we're online inside parliament with the first wi-fi connection"? the discussion was rooted in extreme short-termism, no real implications of change discussed. and there was that annoying romantic assumption that when mps start to blog they'll have to be more 'real". while you tom are such a funny drama queen, much loudly mimed facial exasperation etc

→ Posted by: russell higgs at July 15, 2003 2:04 PM

humm, why did no one suggest that everyone get in touch with their mp and suggest to them that they look at weblogs. offer their help in either showing what was possible or even setting it up?
i have emailed my mp with just such a suggestion. it did feel a bit like no one was willing to take the leap last night, but people were willing to talk about how long they had been blogging.

→ Posted by: mark simpkins at July 15, 2003 2:27 PM

When I saw this post I was thinking 'don't feed the trolls', but hitherto's linked response is a useful outcome of this tiny spatlet: reasonable points, soberly made. But Simon/hitherto, while I have some sympathy for your position (although protesting against new words all too often appears Daily Telegraph-ish), there is a useful outcome of the blog movement, too.

Yes, the concept goes back to the beginning of the Web; the last chapter of Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web (1999) puts that beyond any doubt. It's really just a new word to describe what he wanted the Web to be all along: a place where anybody could publish their ideas and findings as they occurred, allowing all sorts of new linkages to form. But in the second half of the nineties, that vision was so overwhelmed by the rise of commercial brochure sites that the world needed reminding that the Web isn't just a variant on traditional publishing with the same old constraints and gatekeepers. Sometimes it takes new words and new descriptions to focus our attention on what's already there.

You said, in your first essay on the subject, 'Blogs are fundamentally no different to the personal websites that have been made so easy by the likes of Geocities since 1996 or so.' Maybe so, but how many of those Geocities sites grew beyond a few pages built in a first flush of activity? A minority, I'd bet. When people are thinking in terms of 'building a site', the temptation is to tackle it like any other one-off project: in, build it, done, out (all those animated gifs of men-at-work signs). But when the tools they use and the rhetoric of the form stress the open-endedness of what they're doing, the constant changingness of it, they'll approach it in a different spirit. True, they still might not stick at it, but they'll have engaged more with one of the major strengths (and weaknesses) of the Web - its transience - than they would have if they'd bunged up a picture of their cat and left it at that.

You clearly have an appreciation for the finer points of rhetoric and the subtle cut and thrust of civilised debate (to wit: 'DO SOMETHING THAT'S ACTUALLY OF WORTH YOU STUPID, POINTLESS, SELF-IMPORTANT, DULL, TEDIOUS, MINDLESS *FUCKS*'). Surprising, then, that you miss the rhetorical significance of all this. Any 'new' Web 'movement' that wakes up the media and (just perhaps) the masses to the potential of all those PCs and all those internet connections and all those 10MB accounts of free webspace given out with all those net connections and all those ideas and observations in all those people's heads in all those countries, cities, homes and offices is a good thing in my book.

These stupid, pointless, self-important, dull, tedious, mindless fucks have collectively built a rhetorical, technological and cultural edifice without which a great many 'things of worth' would not have been made. And if you haven't noticed what those are yet, you're too busy bristling at a trivial neologism to pay attention.

→ Posted by: Rory at July 15, 2003 2:59 PM

Dammit, I forgot Tom's comments munge the paragraph breaks. A more reader-friendly version will be posted at my joint soonish.

→ Posted by: Rory at July 15, 2003 3:00 PM

Rory - I enjoy exploring the full range of rhetorical forms, from (I hope) fairly erudite, reasoned explorations of a subject right down to ranting drunkenly on an IRC-fed linklog late at night. Life's rich tapestry and all that... The chief problem I have with your argument is that, yes, the format of blogs makes it easy to publish a site, but it doesn't make it any easier to create anything of significance. To use your analogy, too many of the blogs I see are the effective equivalent of someone posting a picture of their cat, and then doing exactly the same thing again and again each day. I'm also sceptical that blogs will actually wake up "the masses". Certainly to date, despite media coverage, I know of no-one with a blog who isn't extremely technically literate and in touch with the entire internet/geek scene on a daily basis. I guess this is really part of the problem I have - the significance of blogs is stated again and again all over the place, but it really is too early to tell where the format will go. There's a general tendency these days to pronounce something's historical significance in the present, when only a decent period of time can tell us what is historically significant. Get back to me on this in 30 years or so :)

→ Posted by: hitherto at July 15, 2003 3:57 PM

Isn't one of the problems with blogs that they're compared with other publishing mechanisms?

I mean, it's common for publications to justify their validity on the basis of their readership figures ("4 million readers can't be wrong"). But using this thinking to evaluate weblogs just isn't appropriate imho.

Who cares if most weblogs are only of interest to a tiny number of people? I know that many of the entries on my own blog are read by between 4 and 5 people, but that's fine: those are the 4 or 5 people who I'm writing them for.

Sure, some blogs will have greater appeal: and that's fine too. But denigrating weblogs because they're introspective is like declaring the bicycle pointless because we have oil tankers.

And I *like* looking at pictures of kittens on other peoples weblogs!

→ Posted by: Tom Hume at July 15, 2003 4:22 PM

Hitherto wrote: To use your analogy, too many of the blogs I see are the effective equivalent of someone posting a picture of their cat, and then doing exactly the same thing again and again each day. [snip]
This is a hypothetical situation, but what if everyone posted very useful information to their blogs, for example, details of how to connect a P800 phone to an iBook via bluetooth, would you be so critical of them then?
I believe one of the best things you can do as a blogger is post this kind of specific information, or about subjects you have specialist knowledge of.
I like the idea that weblogs allow us to collectively contribute to the web like this; it's like putting coins in a money-box; the blog posts are the coins, the money-box is the wealth of information that can be tapped into. The blog format is simply the mechanism that allows this to happen.

→ Posted by: Matt at July 15, 2003 4:52 PM

(Sorry Tom. Hope you're enjoying this, or at least ignoring it...) Hitherto - "yes, the format of blogs makes it easy to publish a site, but it doesn't make it any easier to create anything of significance". It doesn't make it easier to create if you assume that creativity is something people either have or they haven't - I'm not sure I'd agree with that; and I'm not sure how valuable one's 'latent creativity' is when it comes to actual *creation*. Highly creative people can end up creating very little, depending on their circumstances; while less creative people can create a lot that others value. ¶ While it might be true that blogging doesn't "make it any easier to create anything of significance", it may well be that it *does* make it easier for things of significance *to be created*, in general. Screw it, I'm in rhetorical mode here, so I'll drop the equivocation: without the weblog phenomenon, all sorts of great things that are currently on the Web would not be. The habit of writing regularly for an audience has spurred webloggers to post things which they would otherwise have left in a bottom drawer, out of the public eye, inside their heads, or wherever; and some of those are *good* things that deserve an audience. Even if they might one day have got them "out there" in a different form - which is less likely if they don't consider themselves to be particularly creative - the fact of posting them sooner rather than later means that they spend longer in the public eye, are enjoyed by more people, and have a better chance of being appreciated at a time when their creator could most use some encouragement. ¶ Look, I was once a skeptic; I had a personal site for a year before I tried blogging, even while I watched the nascent efforts of early bloggers like our host. And I'm still something of a skeptic - my site isn't just a blog, in fact is predominantly not a blog, and I usually think of myself as a website creator (writer, artist, whatever) rather than a blogger. But I've written a quarter of a million carefully-chosen words under the guise of 'blog', a great many of which would not have been written otherwise; and some people have quite enjoyed them. Forget the shameless self-promotion, though: go and read tailorstoday.com, or izzlepfaff.com, or defectiveyeti.com - the whole thing, their entire archives - and come back and tell me that nothing good has come out of the form. ¶ Honestly, getting back to you "in 30 years or so" would be *pointless*, a missed opportunity - this moment will have passed, these people will have gone, and you will not have enjoyed their work when it was fresh and vital; it'd be like arguing about whether or not there was any merit in 30-year old television shows that you didn't bother to watch when they were new because they were on the wrong channel. ¶ Speaking as one fellow creator to another - because I see you're writing a novel, writing poetry, and so on - I can only say, try it for yourself. Or if you don't want to try it (which is perfectly reasonable - it does take up time you might want to spend in other ways, like writing a novel), then reserve your judgement. Don't just snipe from the sidelines; how pointless is that? I'm not a ballet dancer, and I don't go to the ballet, so why would I waste my time railing about the use of the word 'ballet' to describe what is obviously (obviously!) a form of dance? ¶ I'm not saying it's a revolution; the revolution is the Web, not this small slice of it. But the growing phenomenon of personal websites, regularly updated, whether they're called blogs or whatever else, is worth celebrating - and if that means a few cheerleaders celebrating their day in Parliament, then more power to them.

→ Posted by: Rory at July 15, 2003 5:54 PM

Damn, needed another edit. For: "It doesn't make it easier to create if you assume that creativity is something people either have or they haven't - I'm not sure I'd agree with that", read: "It might not make it easier to create, assuming that creativity is something people either have or they haven't - although I'm not sure I'd agree that's how creativity works"

→ Posted by: Rory at July 15, 2003 6:06 PM

I don't think it matters what you write. It could be tech, crap, cats or cornhole....nevermind. If it's on the 'net then it gets scraped, it pops up on the engines of God and you have little control over it unless you ban all the bots. Drifting. There may be hundreds of thousands of 'logs out there but it wouldn't make any difference if they all wrote good or bad crap. They get found very easily and they do diffuse the 'airwaves'. Whether the content deserves to be there is up to the 'consumer' and I find it interesting that the surfer, the wanderer is not mentioned at all in these discussions. Blogs talking about blogs is ...well ... narcissism. Isn't that what all 'logs are about?

I think it's a certainty that blogs influence other 'loggers, this meeting was supposed to be about blogs opening up debate. But, when the mic is handled by (us) the 'blog world order' how democratic is that? Does everyone have to 'log away for it to be democratic? Methinks there's problems in this approach.

I know it's ironic (literal), I have a 'log. It just amplifies my schizoid personality. Criticism is good.

→ Posted by: Gummi at July 15, 2003 6:12 PM

Okay I haven't read every comment that has been posted here so far because, to be honest, you're all far too long-winded (sarcasm alert!) but it does seem, just from a glance mind you, that everyone is missing the point. 'Weblog' is just a noun to describe a particular method of writing for the web, really. The weblog phenomenon, and weblogs themselves, are two distinct things entirely. Just because I have a weblog, it doesn't mean I'm going to change the world. It's like comparing a state-of-the-art mountain bike to a penny farthing - they're both bicycles, they're both representative of a major social/technological breakthrough, but that doesn't mean they're on the same level. I'm sure I could write an essay about this if I were properly motivated (which I might do, I have a lot of time on my hands) and the bicycle analogy is kind of absurd, I admit, but I think I'm making a point here somewhere.

→ Posted by: MacDara at July 15, 2003 7:36 PM

On one level, this whole debate is really just a bunch of bombastic chefs staring at a chicken sandwich and arguing over whether to call it a canape. In the end, most people will probably just call it a chicken sandwich. And the chefs, brawling in an empty kitchen, will be ignored by sensible people who will eat and enjoy the sandwich, blasphemous ingredients and all.

On another level, it's another round of "you can't be negative"/"I'm okay, you're okay" political correctness and its unnecessary "yes I can" responses that fan the flames of hindered expression, and encourage people not to point out what's wrong with the world -- the kind of dainty balderdash that seems to be encouraged in this age of Bush and Blair complacency.

Good God, people, if you're trying for the blog equivalent of a Vidal-Mailer fight, then you're hopelessly tepid. Wake me up when people are fighting about something important.

→ Posted by: Ed at July 15, 2003 9:50 PM

There's a simple solution to this:

stop reading his weblog. Stop referencing him - and with a bit of luck, he'll fade away.

I'd highly recommend the same treatment for people like Bill Thompson too.

→ Posted by: Martin at July 15, 2003 11:58 PM

MacDara: "'Weblog' is just a noun to describe a particular method of writing for the web, really." Well, no. There's lots of websites - magazines, criticisms, reviews, creative writing sites (fray, upsideclown: these are NOT weblogs) - out there which are clearly writing for the web and are clearly not weblogs. Is Salon a weblog? Emphatically not. It's a lot more specific than that. Yes, the "weblog phenomenon" and "the weblog" are separate things, but we can't go around labelling everything blogs willynilly (as there is a tendency to do at the moment). I'm at work and don't quite have time to construct a decent explanation of what "weblog" is, but it is FAR more than merely "writing for the web".

→ Posted by: tom at July 16, 2003 10:02 AM

In response to tom, in all fairness I intended an emphasis on 'method' rather than just 'writing for the web', and by method I mean the sequential publishing of individualised chunks of data, whether these are single hyperlinks or a linkless essays. (I'm coming at this from both a philosophical and information science perspective: there should be a taxonomy of weblogs, some sort of subject heading list.) In this respect, I would consider sites such as Upsideclown to fall under the main 'weblog' umbrella, even though they are not strictly weblogs (they're self-contained; not part of the blogosphere conversation, so to speak). I know I could explain myself better, but it's uncomfortably humid here and I don't have any air conditioning.

→ Posted by: MacDara at July 16, 2003 7:14 PM

"To use your analogy, too many of the blogs I see are the effective equivalent of someone posting a picture of their cat, and then doing exactly the same thing again and again each day." As if that's not the only problem...

→ Posted by: Tempest at July 18, 2003 12:10 AM