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How I Learned to Stop Sneering and Love the Blog

I’ve heard more than once the utterance that blogging is dead, having been slowly poisoned by Twitter, Facebook, and other younger mediums.  Having just started this new blog, you can imagine that I disagree- sort of.  Before explaining this position, let me preface that I have been involved with the internet in a professional capacity for about 11 years now, and my use of computer based communication dates back to BBS services I would dial-up on my screaming 1200 baud modem.  Given this background it might be surprising that I only recently decided I knew what the hell a blog was- or at least what it should be.

The medium did not get off to a good start in my opinion, on account of its name.  For the record, I’m still not the biggest fan of the word “blog.” It sounds more like the noise a toad would make rather than a serious medium of human communication.  But “blog” is indeed what we call it, so I’ll deal.  Recall that the name derives from “web log”, which is even worse.

It is worse because when the term first started popping up, it sort of implied that I should log my actions on the web; a sort of high-tech diary.  And as we all know, diaries are for adolescent girls.  At least I thought so when blogging first came on to the scene, so I simply sneered at it and waited for the fad to go away.  It didn’t go away, but I kept that sneer:  A dumb name for a dumb concept aimed at narcissistic people who think other people really give a damn about what they had for lunch that day and that they are tired after a hard day at school or work.

I kept this perception even while and after I was part of a team that built a blogging platform.  I was working for Indigio Group as a developer, building a product for the Denver Newspaper Agency called YourHub.com.  This was one of the premier “citizen journalism” platforms on the net.  Users could post stories, events, and photos to the site, which is separated into many different neighborhoods in Denver (and later other cities).  The best of those got published and locally distributed in a print version that came in your daily paper once a week.  It was a great idea back then, and it still is in my opinion.  The site is still operating too, but lack of budget has kind of stunted its potential.

Anyway, it was around this time that the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and other popular blogs were gaining significant readership.  Probably for this reason, the DNA wanted to include blogs in the YourHub platform.  While I could understand the rationale behind it, I was still the cynic.  We already had a platform where people could self-publish on the internet, calling it a “blog” seemed like a marketing gimmick- what was the difference between a “story” and a “blog entry” anyway?  We already had a commenting and rating system, so that wasn’t it.  YourHub.com posts were date and time stamped, so that wasn’t it either.  In the end, we just added a few more elements to the “story” concept to help the user navigate to past or future posts in sequence.  The end product was actually very much like the WordPress system I am using for this blog (to read anyway). It can’t be customized or hosted at any other domain, so those are some key differences.

So we wrote the code and deployed it, but I still had very little respect for the blog.  The reason was simple: most blogs had little or no value to me.  Some chronicled people’s lives that I didn’t care about, many consisted of 1 sentence entries followed by a link somewhere, and a few took a departure toward the absurd (I’m thinking specifically about a blog by “Duke the Dog” detailing his adventures chasing squirrels and following his “master” around).  Granted, every once and a while I read a blog entry that was interesting to me, but these were few and far between.  Certainly not frequent enough to wipe that sneer from my face (For the record, this whole sneer thing is a metaphor; I don’t walk around with perpetual Elvis-lip).

And if you were to ask me my opinion mid 2008 you would have found I held largely the same opinion.  What then, has changed my perception in the last year- so much so that I’ve started a blog myself, 10 years or more after the medium was invented?  Two specific things in succession really: Twitter and my Kindle 2.  Twitter did kill the blog. At least, that certain type of blog that consisted of only a sentence and a link.  In addition to that, the form has matured.  Once I got my Kindle 2, I subscribed to and started reading good blogs.  They exist!  Particularly inspiring was Good Math, Bad Math.  Here was a guy who wrote a sort of op-ed piece in his spare time while working for Google.  His posts are well written, interesting, and have real value to me.

I also use my Kindle 2 to read the New York Times and enjoy actual op-ed columns by Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman.  I found that I was just as enthusiastic about the pieces written for Good Math, Bad Math as I was about those more mainstream offerings.  Having listened to John C. Dvorak pimp his blog on Twit for years, I decided to read that too- Then Wil Wheaton’s, Arianna Huffington’s, and Robert Scoble’s.  For the most part, these offerings consisted of really engaging and enlightening commentary, and even bona-fide journalism.

The difference of course, is that these blogs are intelligent and well written.  Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman are published in one of the largest news outlets in the world.  Blogger’s aren’t, but they can write posts as if they are.  That is to say they can be well written and more importantly, have something to say of value to readers.  That something could be a major news scoop you happened to be privy to, or it could be a short essay like this one.  It could be a product or service review (as many are) or simply an opinion on a current event.  The key is to be genuine and articulate.  I approach these posts as I did essays in college- each post should have focus, some entertainment value, and something worthwhile to say.

So it dawned on me that I love living in a world where anyone who cares to write something can instantly distribute it worldwide.  It is certainly better than a world where only large corporations decide what is fit for print.  If some crappy blogs are the price we have to pay for this, then so be it.  Even better, Twitter and Facebook have killed the weakest of blogs, like lions thinning a heard of zebras.  If you want to tell the world about a cool site you have discovered, you now use Twitter, not your blog.  If you want to gripe about what a bitch the barista was this morning, post that on your Facebook wall.  But if you want to write a structured argument, detailed review, or accurate news account, you should blog.  After all, how articulate can one be with only 140 characters?

Therefore I proclaim that the blog is dead, long live the blog.  Blog 2.0 if you will.  Personally I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed writing these first few blog entries.  I’d be lying if I said I started this blog without commercial gain in mind.  I’m working on a few startups and have a software and development company.  Starting a blog is PR 101, but I can’t imagine what I would write about on a weekly basis if confined to just my business activities.  It would be terribly boring to write and horribly boring to read.  At the same time, I have come to the realization that I have a unique and valid world view.  It is by no means the only valid world view, but I believe that I can offer an interesting perspective of world events through my lens of tech startup entrepreneur.

So I started a blog and have found it to be an enjoyable and empowering experience.  The world would probably be a better place if everyone took some time now and then to articulate their thoughts and beliefs.  I guess those adolescent girls are onto something with their diaries after all.