21 February 2002

Blog-about

The irritation that some express relative to blogging-about-blogging strikes me as utterly flummoxing. This is the Web; if you don’t want to read a blog about blogging, go to another site.

Yes, in the online world the gravitational attraction to suddenly-hot topics (Googlewhack, Blogger’s Manifesto, and so on) engenders intense attention to matters that many people will find dull. But in a hyperlinked world, one or two clicks can get you to discussions of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations or differing ways of formatting multi-column web pages, or the US government’s staggeringly misguided foreign policy, to comics or sports or film or dancing hamsters. Don’t kvetch; blog something more interesting, or go to another interesting site.

I suppose it’s flattering, in an odd way, that anyone would care what a blogger writes about. It seems to imply, “Your readers care so desperately about what you say that we decline to go elsewhere; but we don’t like this topic, so write about what we want to hear about.” We can show evidence that a large number of bloggers want to write and read about blogging. Probably even more don’t want to.

“This Web is big enough fer both of us, podner.”

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