[lbo-talk] Blogosphere [was Re: Karl Rove Beats The Rap]

ravi gadfly at exitleft.org
Sat Jun 17 11:37:42 PDT 2006


On 17/06/2006 1:50 PM, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
> Yoshi:
>
> Railing against blogs due to a large number of sorry
> blogs is like railing against poetry due to a large
> number of sorry poems or against email due to a large
> number of sorry messages. [...] One doesn't rail
> against a genre or a medium just because a large
> majority of pieces produced in or through it are
> mediocre or worse. Technorati claims that it is
> "[c]urrently tracking 44.8 million sites and 2.6
> billion links" -- probably, by now a majority of blogs
> are written in languages most LBO-talk subscribers
> can't read and therefore can't really evaluate.
>
> ======================
>
> Precisely right.
>

Absolutely! Yoshie and Dwayne (sorry I cut out his part) nail it!

Apart from non-English blogs, there are also special interest or small group blogs. Some of the best information on say Linux, or Network Security, can be found in blogs.

Take my blog: its what some on this list (Dennis Redmond -- did I get the name right?) would probably call masturbation or some such -- mostly bits of news (yes, sometimes from outlets like NYT, etc) that I find interesting. There are probably only 10 or 15 people who regularly read my blog. These are mostly folks to whom I used to forward such news by email. A blog/RSS provides a better interface for such a function: less intrusive, more readable, searchable, centrally archived, etc. Often, I use the blog to either bookmark something or write a few quick notes about some experience or investigation. I am surprised by how many hits some of these (such as some of my Mac tips or "Hiking with a baby" post get!).

Kos and a few latecomers (Wonkette, Wired, et al) might think they are the only or biggest presence on the Internet. Let them enjoy their interpretations, but we do not need to adopt their view.

To play the psychoanalysis game ;-) -- Why does the Internet (and computing in general) threaten leftists so much?

Thanks for the Christianity bit! Extremely timely and informative.

--ravi



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