Love/hate/blog

Partisans either in favor, or critical, of blogging seem to have an awful lot in common with the three blind men asked to describe an elephant. Depending of the part of the elephant they touched, each envisioned an entirely different type of creature.

After my essay of a month ago, I've had a similar experience ... only with a lot more emotion.

My intent with "Blog No More" was to pen a cautionary tale for would-be bloggers -- detailing two realities of creating and maintaining a personal Web log that I'd discovered in the year since beginning and abandoning my own (and while, simultaneously, writing this blog as a tech Web newsletter and contributing to a group blog in a different industry).

It was designed to counter the hype that many in the mass media had heaped upon blogging in the wake of its use in politics and by entertainers. As Rob Greenlee of WebTalkRadio said to me, too much hype and unrealistic expectation and blogs become this decade's equivalent of personal Web pages -- easy to set up and just as easy to let sit idle and watch die a slow, neglected death.

After the essay appeared here, it was linked to by several sites and reposted (with my okay) by the WebTalkRadio site. While a large number of comments I received were in agreement, others tended to fall into one of three camps:

1) Those who read what I'd written and read even more into it. This was the most common, and something I'm used to as a long-time writer and commentator. Say anything even slightly critical on a sensitive topic, even if it's wrapped in something nice, and the monkeys fly out of the asses of the True Believers to pillory the Unholy. Try it sometime on the topic of your choice: the Apple Macintosh. Amiga users. Star Trek. Star Wars.

Usually these can be set straight by pointing out what you said, what you clearly didn't say and what others implied. These were the most interesting -- and eventually even the most thoughtful -- exchanges I had. Star Wars notwithstanding.

2) Those who read what I'd written and attacked me personally. Somehow, through a single essay, I became the poster child for All That Was Wrong with Old Media. Never mind I've been using, and advocating, new media before it was even called that (at KING-AM Seattle in the mid-1980s, I ran a computer BBS for listeners on an old-for-even-then personal computer running SOLStar).

A couple of these came from the clique I'll cheerfully call the High Priests of Blogging. These are the folks who, on one hand, point out how blogging frees the masses from the tyranny of traditional media. Then they attacked me for not implementing comments, or a "blogroll," or other jargon-laden features that the masses would struggle to understand. It's always nice when one kind of tyranny is easily replaced by another.

Always beware the ad hominem attack -- if someone is going to attack the arguer rather than the argument, odds are they don't have much of an argument of their own.

3) Those who read what I'd written and disagreed. I'm actually fine with this. It's ain't a perfect world. People can disagree, especially when something is new and everyone is still getting his or her head around what it is and what it may mean.

But some of the disagreements made me think of the elephant and the fact (again) that blogging is more of a publishing mechanism than a medium. And that very elephant may be at the heart of the disagreements.

Blogging isn't just one thing. It's at least two very different things, with very different motivators and goals.

Blogging-as-journalism. This is why I blog. Blogging is an outlet for my writing and observations on tech (Byte Me), news media (Lost Remote) and life (dead Random Bytes). For me -- and for many others -- it's a journalistic medium. Not journalism in the "big media" mold, but a type of journalism nonetheless: I'm careful of my facts, I think things through before committing them to pixel and I write with an audience in mind.

I write to be heard.

Now there are many other valid reasons to write. But mine -- and I suspect, others of the blogging-as-journalism school -- is to be thought-provoking enough in my observations, analysis and commentary to garner an audience. (The size of the audience can be large or small; what's important is that, to the one doing the blogging, it be the right size audience for what they're trying to communicate.)

And for journalism, third-party validation is critical. As I'd noted, editors (with their reputation) and publishers (with their money) implicitly endorse that you have something worthwhile to say because they take a risk publishing you, be it in print or online.

In retrospect, there is an additional validation method on the Web that is unique to the Internet: linking. The more sites that link to a blog, the more "valid" the linked-to site becomes (this is also the concept, in part, behind rankings in the automated services Technorati and Google). Respected bloggers who routinely link to other blogs are the de facto editors of blog journalism, conveying validity by putting their reputation on the line, link by link. And that, as one fashionable felon might say, is a Good Thing.

Still, blogs are a long way from replacing other forms of journalism. Pro-blog partisans like to say that the number of people reading blogs is more than the number of people watching CNN. Sure. And the number of people reading weekly community newspapers is likely greater than the number of readers of the New York Times.

It doesn't mean that any blog has the same impact as CNN because not every blog reader reads every blog. Most blogs still, and may always, have tiny audiences.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing, either, for many bloggers. Which leads us to our second approach to blogs:

Blogging-as-conversation. Sometimes, you toss an idea out to state it. Other times, you toss it out just to discuss it. That's the second approach to the blogging mechanism -- using a blog as a conversation starter.

In this case, size doesn't matter. The audience can be family, friends, co-workers or even a blogger talking to his or her self (a.k.a., the sound of one hand typing). It can be a way to refine writing skills, knowing there's the potential of an audience.

It can be the digital equivalent of a bunch of teens on New Year's Eve grabbing a bottle of champagne, heading to an abandoned house and talking about everything that goes through their head regarding life, its joys and its despairs. It can be topic- or interest- driven. Or it can be like Seinfeld -- about nothing at all.

Blogging-as-conversation has plenty of precedent, even digitally: Usenet newsgroups. Early CompuServe Forums. Computer bulletin board discussions. Create a Web log with a comments feature, and you've got their equivalent with graphics, hyperlinks and really easy-to-use tools.

Heck, in my teens I contributed to several science-fiction fanzines which were usually nothing more than the contributors commenting on each others' contributions of the previous issue. It was a group blog with comments on paper (albeit sans links).

Of course, blogging-as-journalism and blogging-as-conversation are two ends of a continuum, with many variations as you slide from one end to the other. But none are invalid if you get out of it what you want.

So blog if you want to. But set your expectations accordingly. As with any worthwhile effort, good blogging takes time and energy. You don't get an automatic audience or effortless high quality, the two "dirty little secrets of blogging" that I still maintain are true. And people who try to tell you otherwise are either deluding themselves ... or may have some nice blogging tools to sell you.