At no point, ever, ever ever, have I ever, ever called updating my website “blogging”. The viral craze that has been the Next Big Thing ™ for the last year on the internet is leaving me feeling a little concerned. What is all the fuss about? Who are all these cliquey fuckers who have suddenly realised that you can be self published?
I’ve been putting my thoughts and links onto an evolutionary chain of websites since my humble members.theglobe.com/infoxicated/ beginnings five years ago. I never presumed this habit was anything other than just recording occasional thoughts or having the occasional rant. And I don’t update every single day because, hey – call me boring, but my life does not change that much on a daily basis.
A couple of years ago having your own web cam set up so you could lose your virginity online was the number one way of attracting legions of visitors to a humble me and my dog “home page”, as they were called back then. Now you gotta have a Blog, man, and you gotta update every day – heck, make it several times a day, and you gotta link to an army of other Bloggers who will reciprocate… and so on and so on.
I’m not bitter about being or not being part of any kind of scene – I’ll gladly miss out on being defined as a blogger. I just think that this whole thing is as over rated as the dotcoms of 2000 were. Surely we’ve learned from that year to see through the hype of the Next Big Thing ™ and recognise each NBT’s place in the evolution of the internet?
Nobody is going to make their fortune with a weblog and the chances are that updating a blog every single day with something worthwhile will just burn you out.
And for what end?
What is it with this thing that has reached saturation point on the web? It is actually working against the use of the net as an information source.
Say you want to search for something – like 80’s memorabilia, for example. Increasingly you don’t get a page full of links to 80’s memorabilia sites from your query. Instead you get a page full of links to blogs where their late 20’s – mid 30-something writer is having a fit of nostalgia and must tell the world like they are the only person in that age group who remembers how fucking sad Wham and Duran Duran were.
Blogs are suffocating the ‘net like weeds do a garden.
Just as scientists predicted some years ago that the Earth would end up under a layer of trash created by our relentless consumption and disposal, it seems somewhat ironic that we’re managing to do the same to cyberspace as well.
And with the above, I’ve contributed another kilobyte of trash…. if you cant beat ’em…