Thursday, July 31, 2008

Blogging

It seems pretty obvious that someone who calls himself The Tech Curmudgeon should be blogging about ... well, blogging, among other things.

The fact is, I still consider myself a newb n00b in the medium, though I'm trying to catch on as quickly as I can. My first reaction, as I'm sure is true for a lot of people, was "Why would I want to read about a lot of other people's favorite TV shows, or restaurants, or laundry detergent or whatever?"

After some serious introspection, I realized that I don't. But there's a lot of other good stuff out there that is interesting to read. In fact, I'm interested in stuff I didn't even know I was interested in ... didn't even know existed!

The other problem is that it's an infinite time pit. If you start reading blogs, you'll inevitably want to follow links to see what the posters are talking about, and that will get you started on other blogs, and so on. When you read a book or a newspaper or magazine article, you eventually finish it (unless you're like me, and they just pile up, half read, on the coffee table.) On the Internet, nothing ever ends. I don't have a workaround for that problem, I'm afraid. I suppose having a day job helps, but it's still too easy to get caught in a never ending train of link chasing.

And there's the quality thing. I heard about a few sites that offer blog recommendations, but they offer zillions of them! Technorati.com lists thousands of blogs, covering every topic in the spectrum of human thought. Squidoo.com is supposed to help you find all the blogs relevant to your interests, but what if you're interested in everything? Everyone's so paranoid about all the personal information that Google is hoarding, but I say "Good for them. Figure out what I'm interested in (which has eluded me), and show me that!"

Finally, there's the well-known conundrum of authority on the Internet. How do you know any of this is true? Someone publishes some inaccurate information, and it gets linked to and copied all over the known universe within hours. Now, there appear to be multiple sources corroborating the bogus news, giving it the appearance of truth. (Nothing to worry about here. Readers of this blog get pure, unvarnished opinion, not biased by facts.)

So, I guess the logical conclusion is that blogs suck. I'm glad not everyone feels that way.

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