Whither blogging

I actually remember the first time I heard about blogs. I got some kind of spam email from a person who claimed to be my friend, telling me about how they'd just gotten started "web logging", and what a great time they were having. Now, I didn't know this jackhole, and what they were describing sounded dull as dirt - essentially floating around the web, then publishing where you'd been and what you thought of it. This created the term "blogging" which then got away from the initial concept.

Early on, webpages were pretty much lists. That's what mine was (and still is, since I pretty much quit updating it in the 90s). Here are some cool websites I like, here are some people I know, here's my favorite movies, the books I've read lately, some cool picures I found, etc. Not particularly interesting, and not a lot of reason to ever go back to a site like that, unless it were regularly updated, and so people did. But what do you do to update a website? I would just put up the latest batch of comic strips I thought were clever, still not that much worth seeing. Webcartoonists got going because they had consistent new content, and could get an audience to keep coming back. Marshall Brain's How Stuff Works had new info going up all the time, and, importantly, wound up with so much stuff on it, that people could keep coming back for stuff they hadn't seen before.

But still, there's only so much new content that you can put on a webpage. Enter blogging. You don't need content, you just have to say something. Now, there's a free and easy outlet for everyone out there who thinks they have something to say, no matter how moronic. As a result, the vast majority of all blogs are masturbatory bullcrap. I'm not excluding myself, I'm not doing this for the benefit of the nonexistent reader, it's all about me feeling significant here. There are blogs that actually contain real information, they've become the outlet for people who want to spread the news and distribute what they feel is important info, but don't have any actual journalistic credibility. Most bloggers are the modern equivalent of people who would be standing on the street corner handing out cheap mimeographed pamphlets of rants, or carrying signs about the end of the world, but the bloggers are too introverted to actually go out and face people.

Don't believe me? Go up to the top of the page here, and click on "next blog". I bet you'll find something that isn't worth your time to read, and make you wonder what on earth is wrong with the person who put it there (some of them _will_ tell you what's wrong with them, in excruciating detail). Don't feel obligated to come back to this page when you're done there, you won't hurt my feelings.

So, bloggers are nuts screaming into the void, and good for them. It gives them an outlet, and as I said, I'm trying to complain here so that I stop annoying the people willing to put up with me in person, so it's my outlet too. I just get pissed off over people taking their own blogs too seriously, or other people's too seriously. Get over it, we're all idiots most of the time. The blogs I look at most (all 3 a year) are people telling random stories of their lives and showing pictures of what they've eaten lately. Beats me why this is entertainment, and I wouldn't miss them if they were gone.