Don’t ask.

Anyway, today I ran across this article via autowin. Basically, the author of the article claims – half tongue-in-cheek – that blogs are dead. The popular ‘blogs’ are actually online magazines written by professional writers, and the individual blogger can’t compete. Nor would she want to – the popular blogs are too impersonal to satisfy the spirit of blogging. Instead, the author claims that the discerning wannabe writer should turn to Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter for an outlet.

Of course, he was promptly dismantled in the comments – but I think that all of those people missed the point.

Here’s the thing: I hate Twitter. I hate Flickr. And I fucking hate Facebook. (I’ve seen far too Facebook breakups, not to mention the general ‘friend obsession’ and overall waste of time). I despise all of those services.

But I’m glad that they exist.

I think that the author of the Wired article is absolutely right – blogging is dead for people who use it in the way that he’s describing. Blogging is not for personal communication! It fails miserably at that task! (Besides, we have Email and IM for personal communication) Blogging is a publishing technique, not a social network. To be sure, networks certainly develop around blogging, but the purpose of a blog is to publish information, not to make friends.

Back when blogs were the ‘next big thing’ I hated them, too. If you had something to say, I thought, you should say it on a static webpage! Blogs were for people who wanted to talk about the weather/a party/random personal stuff, post pictures of their cat, bitch mindlessly about their pitiful lives, tell everyone how cool they were, generally display their ignorance, or, most importantly, try and get more readers (aka friends) then the next person.

Guess where all of those people have gone?

Now that I have realized that blogging is a wonderful form of publishing, I glad that most of the self-involved attention seekers have moved on to another medium. It just means fewer distractions for those of us who actually have something to say.

Now, I don’t really mean that. Search engines are great for some things – looking up facts, for instance, or finding a site you already know exists. For anything else, they are essentially worthless.

Let’s say you like bald eagles. If you want to know, say, the wingspan of an average eagle, a search engine is the perfect tool for the job. A few keystrokes, one click, and you’ll probably find the answer. The reason? That information is available on many, many websites. Finding it is easy for the search engine.

The internet is a great way to find information. But most information is not unique to the internet. If you want to know about eagles, you could look in an encyclopedia, or in a book. The internet is simply faster.

But what we really want (or at least, what I want!) are the unique sites. The communities that are concerned with our interests. The website containing information that is found nowhere else. For the bald eagle example, how do you find the site with the the raw data from eagle observations, or the site with the latest information on breeding of captive eagles? (I don’t have any particular sites in mind – I’m too lazy to do any real research, but you know the type) You might be able to find sites like these using google – and if you spend some time at it you almost certainly will. But it is much easier if you can find a site with links to other sites worth looking at.

By now you’re probably saying, “But we know this already! Hyperlinks are the idea that started the world wide web!” Here’s the thing – I think many sites are becoming search-obsessed. Big corporate sites are the worst. Some sites force you to use search – there is no index or other useful navigation. Even when there is other navigation, there are often many older pages that can only be accessed by search. Some blogs are like this too, the worst of them having no ‘previous/next page’ function available. If a category or date button returns more posts than fit on a page, you are out of luck!

Some people do their browsing this way too. They don’t have bookmarks and they don’t remember domain names – if they want to go to a site they like, they just google it! I suspect this causes people to be biased toward using large, popular sites more – after all, the big sites turn up first on search results.

In my personal experience, though, some of the best things on the internet are those that I’ve found through following links. An example:

I am a huge Buffy fan. One day I was browsing through Amber Benson’s site and noticed she was in a web series called Girltrash. This seemed interesting, so I looked it up. (search is great when you know exactly what you’re looking for!) This brought me to the ourchart website – I thought it looked cool, but a big mess. There was, however, a link to ‘afterellen’ on the navigation bar. I clicked on a whim, and once I found my way to the main afterellen.com website, I knew I had found something amazing (and now I waste way too much time there!). But I’m not done yet. I found a reference to Dorothy Snarker’s blog on afterellen, and from there clicked a link to feministing.com, which in my opinion is the best feminist website out there.

Of course, if I have searched for “feminist blog” I would have found feministing.com (it’s the first result, in fact) – but I probably would never have thought to do that if I hadn’t gone through the links first.

So, everybody, keep linking! Don’t assume that the search engine is the best way to find things! And don’t have 5000 links to sites you don’t care about or that are no longer there (and don’t do that stupid link exchange thing!), but link to a few really good sites – maybe someone will find something they really like. To that end, I am now following my own advice …

And now I’m trying to write one.

Anyway, continuing with the theme I started in my essay on essay sites, blogs make things hard to find. Sure, there is a search function, but that’s only useful if you know exactly what you are looking for. So, most blogging software has a tag, label and/or category function. Now, I think what wordpress calls a tag – other software probably has a different name – are basically useless. Bloggers add several tags to each post, usually for the exact topics or persons the post is about. So, if you read a post, you can click on a tag to get other posts about that person. But you could also just search for it. Therefore, tags are essentially search assistance.

Then there are the ‘tag clouds’ with which I have never found anything – perhaps some people like them. (Let me know if you do – I’m curious)

This brings us to categories (or labels, as some call them). These, of course, appear on the sidebar, grouping posts by topic. Categories are great if you want to read about one subject – assuming there is a category for it. There is a problem, though – most bloggers place posts in more than one category. So, you click on one category, read all the posts, click on another category, and – half the posts are the same as in the last category.

The solution, of course, is to place posts in only one category. Blogs would be much improved if this were to happen.

Yes, I realize this is weird and geeky of me. Essays are supposed to br those annoying things you have to write in English class. You turn them in, you get the grade, and you throw them away. Nobody is supposed to like essays.

But, what is an essay? The dictionary thinks that is a “…piece treating a subject from the author’s personal point of view.” So basically, it’s what you think about something. And really, who doesn’t have an opinion? I have an old book called Never at a loss for an opinion. As far as I can see, this describes almost everybody.

Just pick a subject, any subject. Dental Hygene? Bulldozers? Fly Fishing? It doesn’t matter. If the person in question knows anything about the subject at all, they’ll usually tell you all about it. Most will, anyway. A few people are wise enough to know when to keep quiet. Everyone else (and this includes me, by the way), will tell you what they think, and make fools out of themselves in the process.

I’m not sure that this is all bad, though. Sure, airing your stupid opinions on subjects you have no idea about is useless, but surely everyone has a few worthwhile thoughts. Thoughts that others would benefit from hearing. So, if you write these down, you’ll have an essay – and one that is worth reading. While you’re at it, why not put it on the Internet so anyone can read it?

Maybe this is what blogs are – a continuous essay of life. I don’t think so, though. Most blogs don’t have opinions, or arguments. They have information, often, news – sometimes, and lots of pointless rambling. now, back in the good olde days, pre-web 2.0, there used to be what might be called “essay site’s”. At least, that’s what I called them – I never saw anybody else use the term. But that’s what they were, websites full of essays. Coolest. Sites. Ever.

Unfortunately, most of them have shut down. The only one of my bookmarks that didn’t give a 404:

Curry Bucket’s Controversial Web Presence

It’s a pretty good example of what I’m talking about – but it’s also as dead as a doornail. Now the guy has a blog. (Which is not as cool – it’s all poetry)

And that was the problem with those sites. There really wasn’t any way to keep people checking the site day after day, like a blog, so the blogs won. But blogs don’t encourage the essay format at all. They are meant to be read soon after they’re written, and then disappear into the archive, never to be seen again. And who wants to read thorough endless archives to find a few dozen essay-quality posts.

So what’s the solution? An essay page. If you write something worth reading again, put it on a seperate page with a short summery of the post. That way you can use a blog, and people can find really good stuff without looking through endless archives.

The only page like this that I can think of is at the shakesville blog – they have
a feministing 101 page – basically an essay page. I’m sure there are others, but there need to be more. Every blog ought to have one.

Or maybe not. Maybe nobody really care what anybody else actually thinks. I know that I’d rather read an essay than see yet another picture of someone’s dog.