Blogging true believers like to hype the communal virtues of blogging. They claim that blogs are a new form of interactive communication, that the value of blogs are the « blog-rolls » (list of links to other blogs) and the commenting (which, you’ll remember, I had to turn off due to comment spam, although my recently installed spam-blocking plug-ins seem to be working, maybe too well?).
Well, I think this is a load of bullshit:
- 99% of blogs are self-centered emanations of their authors (present company included)
- True on-line « egalitarian » communities are found on forums, not blogs (where the blog creators are god).
- This is the nth time that « enthusiasts » (who may or may not have a financial stake in the matter) try to confuse the medium and the message (think CD-ROMs).
I don’t read blogs. Or actually, I probably do read blogs. Which is the point: I don’t give a shit whether the sites I visit are blogs or not. It is a technical distinction of interest to nerds only.
Because therein lies the true value of blogs: Weblogging systems are useful in that they lower the technical barriers of entry for Web-publishing. Period. That’s it. End of story.
Which is a big deal (to nerds):
- Document management systems have been sought after like a Holy Grail since the beginning of personal computing, and thousands of concepts and software packages, to manage Intranets for instance, have sprung up, but are mostly impossibly complex to set up.
- Weblogging systems are just handy and (fairly) simple tools to build so-called « dynamic » web sites, i.e. where the pages are dynamically generated by the system at the instant they are « called » by the websurfer.
- Weblogging systems can be fairly trivial to set up, and once they are, you can write away without ever bothering again with the technical hassles inherent in maintaining a « regular » Web site. The web publisher no longer needs to keep track of and maintain thousands of pages. The system does it for you. (HTML was intended to be that simple, but it has become incredibly complex. You need to be a real nerd to understand and use JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets etc.)
Which is why thousands upon thousands of weblogs arose.
Which is why I added « sknoblog » to my « regular » site. It is just a quick way of posting tid-bits of news or info that would otherwise not be worth the technical effort to publish the « old-fashioned way ».
Which is why 99.9% of weblogs are uninteresting or downright embarrassing (stream-of-consciousness, knee-jerk posting is « finally » possible).
What’s more, unlike more complex and versatile dynamic web-publishing systems, weblogging systems pretty much all lock you into a « reverse-chronology » time-based organisation of your content. This may be « the language » of weblogs, but for the most part, it sucks, because it is really only appropriate for « hot off the press » and « disposable » content.
The value that can arise from organizing data in a certain way (indexing, library science), as can be found in a rudimentary form on most websites, is mostly absent from weblogs.
So even though you can search for content on a weblog, you basically have little or no way of evaluating the chances that the object of your search actually exists on the weblog.
So might as well Google it.
I’m happy with the weblog way of doing things when I’m pointing to a site or something. I’m quite unhappy when I post a link to a new song, knowing that link will soon disappear into the murky depths of the weblog, never (or rarely) to be seen again.
Which is why I’m evaluating systems that will enable me to have the best of both worlds, and indeed, WordPress’s new « Pages » feature may fit the bill. I’ll have to explore it as soon as I get the chance.
So in the meantime, a nerdy little « hooray » for weblogging systems, and at best, a big, yawning « who cares » from the web-surfer’s perspective.
Because as far as you are concerned, dear reader, your world would be no better or no worse had I coded this little rant « manually » instead of using a weblogging system to publish it.