Review: Blogging

“Oh, god, he’s reviewing blogs on a blog,” you say. “How wankingly self-conscious, self-referential and pompous.“

And that’s exactly it, isn’t it?

How pompous is it of me to think that you’d want to know what I think? How am I qualified to tell you the value of something? Do I have a degree in journalism?

This is a lot of people’s problem with blogs. Who are normal people to have an opinion?

One moment you’re telling people what you think, and they’re going along with it, nodding, slapping you on the shoulder, and the next, people are demanding to see your papers before they evict you from Internetlandia.

Blogs are great for social networking, journalism, online diarising and reviewing. When done well, they can be any given person’s (literally anyone’s) on any given subject, with photos, videos, etc, all tied into a nice little package where you can comment back.

There are many great blogs, written by normal people (or communities), with no journalism experience.

When done poorly, blogs are boring, self-referential, self-aggrandizing trifle taking up a Google hit. I’m thinking of your typical “I hate *insert name of acquaintance here*” (like this one, in the news recently), or “The boring and largely irrelevant love life of *insert blog owner’s name here*”. These blogs devalue a great, relatively young form of writing.

Is it journalism? Well, that’s a loaded question. Blogs, by their very nature, are going to be biased, or at least be more biased (I’m looking at you, Herald Sun) than your average newspaper article. They’re basically all editorial. No one, generally, edits your run-of-the-mill blog, except the blogger themselves.

This can be refreshing. You get to see the thoughts come right out on the (web)page, without the filter of someone else telling the writer what to say. This can also lead to horrible spelling, grammar, formatting (look through mine, for examples) and unfortunate faux pas that are virtually unretractable, as long as someone can press “print screen”.

And for all the talk of how easy it is for any chump to setup a blog and spew his bilge into the passing river of opinion, it’s tough work to create and maintain a good blog. Many a good blog has suddenly disappeared for lack of updates, and many more great ideas have turned into dust in the hands of a poor writer.

I guess, like many forms of writing, it is what you make of it.

4/5