I’m getting mellower in my old age. I mean, look at this place. Movable Type all over the place, photos and delicious links in the right-hand column… What is this, a blog or something?

Nuh-uh. You’re not even close. Still not a damn blog.

I guess that some people would probably accuse me of dabbling in mere semantics at this point, and I think, to be fair, they’d be correct. This site (particularly on the other side of the fence, where I write an irregular diary about relocating from London to Silicon Valley) has an awful lot in common with others which fall under the banner of “blogs”.

But the semantics of the issue are important to me.

Things have changed since I first attempted to explain the problem I had with “blogging” back in 2002.

The tools have steadily improved, for one thing. After all sorts of wacky CMS experiments, I settled on Movable Type for the newest incarnation of this site because it’s now flexible enough to handle what I wanted to do without too much pain, especially since I now have a pet topic which actually warrants a diary-like structure. At the same time, I’ve managed to beat it into enough shape to act as an archive of sporadically written works. This is good.

The definition of “blog” has also solidified somewhat since 2002, to cover a personal, diary-formatted site, often written with a focus on a particular subject or set of subjects. This is a good thing. At least it gives the concept substance.

But two major problems nonetheless remain.

The Ugliest of Words

I’ve never tried to explain this fully before. Somehow it seems a strange argument to be making, but one of the problems I have with the word “blog” is that it’s repulsive.

Find yourself a mirror. Sit down in front of it and consciously say the word “blog”. Watch your mouth as you do so. It’s a word which has to be screwed around the mouth and spat out. It’s not pretty at all.

It’s an unfortunate collision of phonemes. Thinking about words which use similar sounds, I came up with blag, slog, grog, blob, slob, glob, lob, clog, flog…

Many of them are colloquial. Almost all of them describe something unpleasant, uncouth or somehow “rough” in execution. Words aren’t just conceptual. They have aesthetics and aural qualities, and unfortunately “blog” falls in with a bad crowd.

The etymology of “blog” makes sense enough – a contraction of “web log”, a term which was used to denote a regularly updated list of, well, stuff, on the web. But here we find an interesting trend amongst technologists – to reduce concepts to the fewest possible syllables

Brevity is good, for sure, but not at the expense of clarity or indeed linguistic elegance.

Of course, the obvious response to all this is “what would you use instead?”, and as the years have rolled by that’s become a harder question to answer because, ugly or not, “blog” has worked its way into fairly common usage.

Attempting to replace a common word with another is invariably an awkward, foolhardy enterprise which is doomed to leave one in the company of the Academie Francaise and their denigration of “le weekend.”

A final note on a related word – “blogosphere”. Something about this just makes my teeth stand on end. Perhaps it’s the unholy wedding of “log” (a germanic-rooted word arising from Middle English) with “sphere” (from a Greek root). It’s like a traffic accident of words. Are blogs really so special that the concept of “the web” (of which they are a small part) won’t suffice?

Holy Smoke, Bat-blog!

“Blogs set to destroy mainstream media” is becoming a common theme in various places these days. To read some pieces, you’d think that the blog was a new superhero, here to clean up a corrupt Gotham City.

You can find much of this stuff with websearches such as “weblogs killing journalism”, “blogs death of newspaper” “blogs change the world” etc. Some examples include:

• Participatory Journalism and the inevitable death of newspapers
• The Mainstream Media suffering from freedom envy
• The News of My Death
• Blogs ARE transforming journalism

I don’t buy it, though, for two reasons.

Journalism?

There’s a broad gap between journalism and punditry. To be fair, journalists themselves can be guilty of blurring the distinction, but only to a limited degree. Journalism is about the reporting of events, not about commentary on their significance from a particular standpoint.

But, some argue, a lot of mainstream media is just punditry laid over the top of copy from AP, Reuters et al. Maybe the lazy stuff, yes, but in any newspaper of note the majority of the content comes in-house. AP and Reuters were designed to (and continue to) fill the gaps where the media outlet couldn’t get its own coverage.

So, could a blogger pick up an AP feed and write their own comprehensive news? Perhaps, but only as a full-time job (on which more shortly). And even then, are they honestly versed in the intricacies of international libel law (to pick a particularly dangerous example)?

Even if this were to happen; even if a group of bloggers got together to collaboratively produce a news source, you soon run into problems of scale. Say it becomes a source of note, attracting millions of readers daily. That requires money to run, and it also requires that you settle on an editorial voice to suit those readers.

Guess what, bub. You just became mainstream media.

Economics

Some suggest that more popular bloggers may go full-time, existing on a system of Micropatronage.

Here comes the problem with that. At the sorts of levels we’re talking about to make this sustainable (kottke is looking for $30 per patron right now, for example), each individual “patron” is probably only going to fund 2 or 3 sites a year, if that.

Getting people to pay for web content is getting easier, but not that much easier. Divide the number of potential micropatronages by the number of sites who’d surely like to be sponsored, and you’re looking at a pretty small pot of money.

Micropatronage arguments often make mention of the Renaissance, and the funding of Michaelangelo. And therein lies an interesting tale.

Renaissance Patronage generally involved a single rich patron funding an exceptional artist. The numbers of patrons were extremely small; the numbers of artists who weren’t good enough was huge. We only know of a relative handful of artists who lived off patronage in this way. Thousands more couldn’t get the funding.

Here’s a slightly more likely, sustainable scenario. There are undeniably good writers out there, with entertaining, informative sites. Mainstream publishers are well aware of this. In fact, the cleverer ones have been inviting bloggers to write pieces for them for several years.

I think we’ll see two major shifts in mainstream media in the next decade:

1. Improved, smarter interactive offerings, including more reader participation. These may, or may not replace traditional newspapers, but that’s almost immaterial – they’ll be produced by the same groups.
2. The use of blogs as a way of assessing and recruiting writers; and possibly acquiring their sites as a way of boosting readerships.

After all, it would work rather well in terms of traffic acquisition. As a publisher, acquisition of a popular technology blog could make a powerful draw to your entire site. There’s no huge change in your operating model – advertise carefully, and pay the blogger a staff fee for maintaining it.

So I’m prepared to envisage blogs being drawn into mainstream media offerings. Perhaps the right networks of bloggers may even be able to collaborate to form new mainstream media “hubs”.

The personal publishing boom, then, is undoubtedly interacting already with mainstream media. It will almost certainly affect it, and be affected by it. But it won’t be the death of it.

So, this is really Not A Damn Blog?

I like writing; I have done since I was a kid. Occasionally, people even like reading what I write. Or at least pretending they do…

And yes, this site certainly interacts with, and is built using tools from the “blogging phenomenon”.

Perhaps my continuing avoidance of the “blog” label is just inverse elitist snobbery…

hitherto stamps feet
hitherto: I don’t wanna be a blog. I’m special

… But I honestly don’t think so.

I don’t want to label my own little corner of the world with a word which is flat ugly in every way. And I can’t ally myself under that label with a culture which too often seems almost gleeful in its attempt to declare its place in history before history is ready to judge.

Hell, if I wanted that I’d join the UK’s Labour Party.

Blogs have given us good, and bad. It’s a social good that anyone can publish more easily online now, as long as the flipside is accepted: way more dross to wade through. It’s good that at least the role of the media is cursorily examined in the light of blogging, even if that does lead to unfortunate hyperbole.

But me, I’m happy to keep putting together a diary and a loose archive of writings.

Not a damn blog.

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Tuesday, March 15th, 2005 at 11:01 pm .
It's arbitrarily categorised as being about: Geeking, Trends and culture.
Supernerds with RSS readers will probably wet their pants over the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. We don't do trackbacks here because they're a horrendous spam-trap. Sorry.

You know, this article used to be 4000 words longer, but right before I pressed 'Save', the dog ate it. Honest.