Blog Binging Gorges the Net

Site Pixie writes "Most blogs are created by someone you don’t know, often about something you don’t care about, but that hasn’t stopped ‘blogging’ from becoming a remarkably ubiquitous phenomenon. There are even blogs about blogs such as The Blog Herald. It looks like everyone wants their fifteen minutes of fame online. Estimates put the number of blogs to be in the tens of millions, with several factors influencing the count, such as whether a blog is available for public or private consumption. Carl Bialik investigates the intricacies of counting blogs, and shows how blog indexing sites like BlogPulse and Technorati are bursting at the seams with thousands of new blog entries everyday."

Comments

Second Spam

[JFitzsimmons]

Blogs are turning into the second spam of the internet. Some of them are legitimate and interesting, but a vast majority are not.

Re:Second Spam

[Peaker]

I could say the same about some Slashdot comments.
But I won't, because I chose to read your comment, it was not shoved down my throat.

Re:Second Spam

[nine-times]

Well, the great power of a "weblog" (I hate the word "blog") is that it allows a normal, lowly, everyday human being to share his ideas and voice his opinions. The great failing of weblogs is that they allow normal, lowly, everyday human beings to share their ideas and voice their opinions.

Actually, that's been the power and failing of the internet all along. Anything which gives power to the common man, letting us hear his good ideas, unfortunately also gives power to the common man, giving us access to his incessant prattle. Really, what do you want? Do you want some large media company sifting through and deciding what's good?

I'd rather have access to weblogs, at least so long as they are distinguished from spam in one factor: they aren't showing up in my inbox uninvited. Say as much as you want for however long as you want in your own weblog, and as long as I have to actively choose to read it, fine by me.

If you don't like my weblog, there's a simple solution. Don't visit it.

Re:Second Spam

[Homology]

Blogs are turning into the second spam of the internet. Some of them are legitimate and interesting, but a vast majority are not.

In what way are the majority of blogs not legitimate? Oh wait, I'm sure there are positions available in some American company helping the Chinese government to stiffle free speech. Of course, this is entirely legitimate. But hey, Cash is King, and we won't let small things like common decency stop us for making a killing

Re:Second Spam

[interiot]

Confusing post.

If you mean intentional spam, then it's not the second by far (usenet spam or instant-message spam came first).

If you mean unintentional spam, then you're misusing the word. You can more or less avoid bloggers you dislike, because unlike real spammers, they aren't single-mindedly trying to insert themselves into as many inboxes and search results as they possibly can.

Re:Second Spam

[cowscows]

Ok, so the vast majority are not interesting to you. The vast majority are not interesting to me. But that doesn't make them valueless. Just about every blog out there has value for at least one person, the author, and most likely at least a few others. My blog should be of little interest to you, yet for my family and friends it's a useful source of information about me and what I'm up to.

The only way that blogs can really be compared to spam is perhaps in search engine rankings, where they can muddy the results much like a link farm or whatnot. But I think blaming the blogs themselves is wrong, because that's not what they're trying to do. It's up to google and the others to engineer a solution to this problem.

Re:Second Spam

[Seumas]

Just because you have thoughts doesn't mean they need to be shared. The average blogger reminds me of the average loudmouthed kid who has to make every single thing that goes through his mind every second of the day known to the world.

Okay, you hate George Bush. Wow. That's unique. Great, you hate pinko commie liberal hippies. Good for you. What a unique perspective. You're said about Brad and Jennifer breaking up. Oh, dear - I'm so glad you took the time to communicate that with the world. Your head hurts and your boyfriend dumped you - hurrah. We're so glad to be kept up to date on this. You found an interesting site to link to... wonderful for you.

Every person on the face of the earth does not need a public diary and soap box in the same way that we don't need 800,000,000 television stations so that every single individual can have their own television station to broadcast their drivel on.

And what it still comes down to is that almost all blogs are nothing but a giant ego stroke. People trying to post things that present themselves in such a way as to gain "friends" and attention and make people like them. It's all about "look how neat I am. look at how interesting my thoughts are - don't you want to know me and post on my blog and link to me?"

If you're Seamus - the xbox designer - you might have some great stuff to say on your blog. If you're Seumas, the software engineer who runs a massive free niche auction site but are an otherwise normal person with nothing groundbreaking to say that hasn't already been said a million times in this world through every medium - why should you create a "blog" and throw your every stupid observation, commentary and rundown of your daily personal life out there on the net for six billion potential people to view? Who gives a fuck? You're nobody and you're not unique or interesting.

THE PROBLEM WITH BLOGGING IS THE SELF DELUSION THAT YOU BELIEVE YOU MATTER OR THAT PEOPLE GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU SAY.

And what is the difference between someone posting a message on Slashdot and running their own blog? A blog is about me me me with frequent updates about me me me in some way. Posting to slashdot is offering a one-time statement in a community of voices regarding the current subject.

And I don't care if people think "slashdot was the first big blog". Slashdot is no more a blog than CNN or FOXNEWS or BBC.COM is. It's just another site with news - except that you can comment on the news items (just like you can at Yahoo! news and elsewhere). Since when does everything that isn't static and has an update on some variably frequent or infrequent basis become a "blog"? If you put up a website and never change it, it's a website? But if you put up a website and you update it over the years, it's a blog?

I differentiate blogs from websites based on the criteria of "things I have to say and a place for you to discuss what I have to say with me". Websites may be about you. But blogs are about desperate attempts to build a community around *YOU*. Though occasionally put to good use by certain worthy individuals, often exploited to a useless degree by the self-important blog-cliques.

And for fuck's sake, if you're going to have a "blog", please at least call it a website anyway. When someone tells me to "check out my blog" or "take a look at my livejournal" or I see that it's just a blog from a cookie cutter domain that spits them out with the difficulty of signing in with an email address (instead of having to install drupal or something), it makes me *not* want to go to your site. And chances are, I never will because of it. Just like I would never want to go sit in your bedroom and read y our stupid journal.

Re:Second Spam

[squiggleslash]

THE PROBLEM WITH BLOGGING IS THE SELF DELUSION THAT YOU BELIEVE YOU MATTER OR THAT PEOPLE GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU SAY.

Nope. The problem with "blogging" is the delusion by some outsiders that most bloggers care all that much about interesting their readers.

Like many Slashdotters, I have a "blog" myself. I write it for an audience of one. If someone expresses an interest in something I've written, as they do from time to time, it's interesting and, to a limited extent, I'll engage in the odd argument, but for the most part, the blog exists for me to let off steam. As a location I can rant about politics, computers, cellphone companies, Slashdotters, open source and free software, and other stuff, without actually boring the pants off the people around me or offending them. Sometimes I'll ask a question in the hope it'll be answered, but for the most part, I honestly don't care. The only real interactive nature of it is that after a while, if and when people do look occasionally enough to think it worthwhile looking regularly, you end up with a little community of people who are interested in each other's stuff. Kind of like a group of people who hang out at a pub. That's really the only reason it ends up going online.

And I don't think most bloggers care either. Do you think the 14 year old who explains in great depth how Snuggles shat all over her mother's best rug today and how yesterday Mike (urgh!) broke up with her AGAIN really considers this more than a version of her diary with the potential for the odd bit of feedback?

As far as calling a blog a website and other stuff. Why? Amazon's "just a website" too, as is "Cingular.com" and "Yahoo". A blog is a relatively specific form of website, it's an online journal (and not a "home page" as at least one person argued. This (NSFW! NSFH either, come to think of it...) is a home page, and this is a blog.) It may be a stupid sounding name, but it's nonetheless describes a particular type of website rather than "all websites". Would I prefer a term like "journal"? Probably, that'd probably be more reasonable, and some people - and for the most part I myself do - use that term instead. But you're not suggesting "journal", you're suggesting "website", which I'll start calling blogs the day I drive to building in my vehicle every period of day, driving back to other building in my vehicle while stopping by another building to get products on the way back every some other period of day.

My advice: lose the snobbery. And if you feel posting your unsolicited feelings and news on the web should be beneath anyone, you might want to reconsider your policy of involving yourself in Slashdot discussions. You're missing the point, in a way far sillier than any teenager who writes about their cat is.

ugh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Blogs are glorified web pages are they not?

Just like podcasting used to be called --- audio files, duh!

Re:ugh...

[FLEB]

And web pages are glorified HTTP responses.

Blogs' improvement over webpages is that it's amazingly simple to build and maintain the page, meaning that nearly anyone with half a brain can get a "write-mode" Internet presence that looks good. Today's blogs would have just been yesterday's seizure-inducing, flashing, malformed Geocities page (if it existed at all).

Podcasting isn't all that revolutionary in its parts, but it was more of a chemical reaction among the technologies of web audio (and the bandwidth to carry it), RSS with Enclosures and automated downloaders, (to some extent) portable media players, and the content, personalities, and zealotry to put it all together. Sure, you could do the same thing years ago, and many did, but static-file, homebrew "Internet Radio" never really took off until the method got solidified into a simple, standardized flow, and got the "pass-it-on" mentality that made a lot of listeners into podcasters themselves.

It's the same with websites, but do I complain?

[Elad Alon]

Most blogs are created by someone you don't know, often about something you don't care about, but that hasn't stopped 'blogging' from becoming a remarkably ubiquitous phenomenon.

It's the same with websites. What's the problem? The freedom of speech can't be the sole domain of those with something interesting to say.

Re:It's the same with websites, but do I complain?

[Elad Alon]

Freedom of Speech isn't The Right to Have Someone Who Would Listen. Those people you've mentioned, I've not run into them, and I don't see how they could be a problem anyhow. Don't you prefer them preaching to their monitor to them shouting in the streets? Sure, the first hundred times or so it's hilarious to see them lynched, but after that, it's just more traffic.

Why don't we start with YOUR man-hours?

[Elad Alon]

Heed your own advice, buddy.

Re:how about calling them...

[AKAImBatman]

Personally, I don't think "blogs" per say will go away, but the "blogging phenomena" certainly will go in much the same way as the "Personal Home Pages" of the late 90's. The *idea* of tools that allow you to quickly publish articles is sound enough, and is something I and many others have used quite a bit in lieu of proper publishing tools. This is a good thing because it speeds the time and reduces the overhead between writing an article and making it available on the 'net. The "blogging phenomena" OTOH, is people who use the tools to talk about their cat or the guy who flipped them off in traffic today. My feeling is that these blogs provide no long-term value and will likely experience decline as more professionally done blogs take over.

Sweeping generalizations

[dr.badass]

"Most blogs are created by someone you don't know, often about something you don't care about, but that hasn't stopped 'blogging' from becoming a remarkably ubiquitous phenomenon.

Most web pages, emails, usenet posts, instant messages, SMSes, books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, and indeed, spoken words are created by people I don't know, often about things I don't care about, and that hasn't stopped any of them from becoming remarkably ubiquitous.

I don't understand why people think blogging is different from any of the above.

It looks like everyone wants their fifteen minutes of fame online.

That's a crass assumption. Most do it because they enjoy doing it. Some do it because they want to make money. Some do it because all of their friends are doing it. People have a lot of different reasons. I seriously doubt that "fame", even fifteen minutes of it on the web, is a real motivator for all but a tiny but vocal minority.

But that's the point

[slapout]

often about something you don't care about

But that's the point. You ignore those, I read the ones that talk about things you are interested in.

No need to be so cynical!

[Junks Jerzey]

Wow, the submitter seems to think that blogs are worthless, yet it's a huge phenomenon, and seems puzzled as to why. I've seen this attitude before--it's common on Slashdot--but it's misguided. A weblog is simply someone posting their thoughts on a topic that interests them. It could be links to other sites, it could be software development, it could be graphic arts, it could be TV commercials, it could simply be what appear to be mundane details about daily life. The key is that you ignore what you don't care about. The mundane detail blogs are intended for family and friends (but could still be read by anyone who might want to). The graphic arts blogs are likely only of interest to other graphic artists. Slashdot-types might like software development blogs, Linux advocacy blogs, OS X blogs, and so on. There's no need to be cynical just because other people are writing about topics you have no interest in.

Moderation, blah blah blah [OT]

[thc69]

I think, actually, one of the reasons people mod "overrated" and "underrated" is because it's a way to mod numerically without having to choose a description that doesn't fit. The mod probably thought that it was a generally bad post, though not flamebait or trolling.

Also, why can't a post at it's unmoderated default rating be overrated or underrated?

This is what we wanted

[Damek]

Wow, I remember when I was a teen and the internet was the new big thing (granted, this was the early 90's and the internet wasn't new then, but...)

Everyone was saying how great it would be when everyone was able to easily create and share information.

People, this is what we wanted, and it's pretty much here. This is a good thing. All we need now are better and better ways of sorting & indexing the information being created and shared.