Blog me this...

[illusionofjoy]

Turning to the op/ed page, I've discovered that it is the week of the 'blog. Once again, Ted Rall manages to bring up some points many of us probably haven't thought of before. On the other side of the ideological fence, two days earlier, John Leo commented on the new checks and balances that blogging brings to the media.

What checks and balances? On the internet, any schmuck with a DSL connection and the rudimentary ability to use a keyboard and mouse can post whatever he or she wants. More often than not, one need not worry about a boss, editor or anyone else in a position of authority policing the posts. Blogs are an anarchist's playground of op/ed snippets, rarely containing anything in the form of real news - at least nothing that hasn't been regurgitated from another website. The sheer number of open and public death threats against liberals on conservative (and I use that word loosely) sites should testify to the lack of order in the so-called "blogosphere." It makes me wonder if I now have carte blanche to threaten the life of Ann Coulter. All's fair on the internet, right?

A few days ago, I was thinking about the days when I first got into what was then known as "online journalling." In 1998, there was a distinct difference between a blog and an online journal. Blogger was in it's infancy and still owned by Pyra, rather than Google. In those days, most online journals were hand-coded by people who were willing to struggle through a bit of HTML to get their missives online. Overall, the fact that it was more difficult (relatively speaking) to get an entry published kept most people from bothering with an online journal and the entrees written tended towards a higher caliber. Seven years later, what with the explosion of sites like Blogger, Livejournal and Six Apart, anyone can post anytime as much as they like. What served as a very rudimentary form of quality control - the need to put some actual effort into coding - no longer exists.

I don't necessarily long for the days before blogging scripts, however, I do feel as if I'm being drowned in useless text at times. A cursory glance at Livejournal will dredge up thousands of users who have nothing more interesting to say than, "bought bread and watched the tractor pull on TV today." Even worse are the thousands of users who spit out entries without even framing them with any context of explaining the point of the entry in the first place. A paraphrasing example: "this movie sucks." Is it a personal opinion? Is it a critical look at the plot? Was someone throwing popcorn into your hair throughout the showing? There is simply no way of knowing where the author is coming from.

Ted Rall sums it up perfectly in his latest column:

Bloggers are ordinary people, many of them uneducated and with nothing interesting to say. They're sitting in their rec rooms, regurgitating and spinning what real journalists have dug up through hard work. They don't have sources, they don't report, and no one holds them accountable when they make mistakes or flat out lie.

In other words, todays "journallers" should never be mistaken for journalists. Or, lets put it this way - everyone has an op/ed, just like everyone has an asshole, which generally means that they are full of shit.

Myself included.