OK, I haven’t blogged for a few weeks. Actually I think blogging is highly over-rated to be honest. That’s right, the truth finally comes out. Who the hell wants to read about my lame computing experiences, Jo Smith’s reading habits or Felicia Tries-a-lot’s diet?! Maybe journal style blogs should have stayed down the side of the bed in notebooks with cheap locks – private, and more importantly, not cluttering the Internet with precocious drivel driven by miss-diagnosed self importance! Or am I on the wrong track – maybe that’s not what blogs really are?
Blogging was originally a web log, an online journal that, due to its technical nature, was easy for others to link to. These were all IT geeks. There evolved a community of bloggers who made each other’s blogs more widely read by their collection of reciprocal links. Now, blogging is made available as a free for all hobby. Corporate employees feel obliged to blog, to show their importance and generate web content for the mother company. Motivational speakers give people a morning pep talk that’s quickly forgotten as the day drags on. Teenagers pine over lost love. I mean, honestly, who reads this stuff? What are the popular blogs out there, and are they really blogs?
According to Technorati, TechCrunch is the number one blog in the world. It’s a tech news service, with some opinions, but essentially, it reports tech news.
Huffington Post chimes in at number two. It’s a US non-regular news service in the form of blogs – and lots of them, by a team of journalists, commentators etc. O’Reilly is no where to be seen.
Gizmodo and Engadget come in as third and fourth. They are both gadget and cool tech news services who post in the traditional reverse chronological order of blogs, but like TechCrunch, it is news and reporting more than journal-style entries.
But what about a site like The Inquirer? They don’t claim to be a blog, yet they post news stories in reverse chronological order and have done for a hell of a long time – and often with more wit and exegesis than any of the top three tech-related blogs I’ve already listed. Same goes for HardOcp. It’s a top notch news service and the regular contributors stamp their own brand of humor and sarcasm into the posts in a way that rivals any blog I’ve come across.
Blog is a tainted word. Or it is for me anyway. Why get so hung up on having a blog? Why I am putting this rant in the blog section and not as an editorial on tkArena? It’s all still chronologically posted. It can be subscribed to. Why are we so hung up on having a labelled blogs section? It’s just a pressure pot of potential must-have content. You must have something clever to blog about and it must be in that expected blogging style. Why not just have editorials when the mood strikes and longer news posts with more personality? After all, many of the top blogs sites are just news with personality…