The cleverer the blog name, the more jpegs of odd things, the more ranty the rants the better as far as I was concerned. A million flowers were blooming; it was the birth of multi-directional, multinational, never off line communication and it was coming from the groundlings.
I thought the Earth herself, or at least that portion of it occupied by (here comes the tired but true cliche) "old media companies" was shaking.
After a while however I began to notice a cooling of my passion. Blogs that once seemed fascinating started to bore me. One fine day, I got up, showered, shaved, brewed some tea, stared at the Samsung flat screen monitor and realized that many bloggers were relentlessly shouting know-nothings.
Hey, hey blog fans calm down, I didn't say all. Shhhh. No, baby, I didn't say all. I'm sure your favorites are fantastic; as indeed, are mine.
But the general trajectory of that non-place, the 'blogsphere', seems to be towards more and more yelling and less and less knowing. And if that's what I want (and let's be honest, sometimes you just do) I'll tune in Fox television and watch the highly paid Brit Hume pretend to be a manly man.
Despite this reduction in ardor I didn't abandon blogtopia; no sir, no mam. There are blogs I dig quite a bit.
They fall into three categories:
* blogs that routinely introduce me to information I was completely clueless about moments before reading them (for example, Juan Cole in "Informed Consent" dissecting Iraqi political machinations by reading original Arabic sources and sharing or Scott McLemee of mclemee.com writing about almost anything)
* blogs about the bloggers' life written with style, nerve and as much honesty as humanly possible (Tony Pierce's LA style BusBlog and Riverbend's sharp as a diamond tales of Iraq come to mind)
* blogs that track the glittering global pop and techno culture (yes, although we're headed, poorly dressed, improperly fed and infrequently laid straight to a fiery geopolitical/environmental hell of unexampled terribleness there is such a thing and Warren Ellis at warrenellis.com, among other villains, gathers the tribe to review).
.d.