Monday, July 16, 2007 6:36 AM
Nice article in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, Happy Blogiversary:
Notwithstanding the words of Tom Wolfe, who puts an elegant boot, below, into the corpus of bloggers, there are many more people today who would read blogs than disparage them.
The consumption of blogs is often avid and occasionally obsessive. But more commonly, it is utterly natural, as if turning to them were no stranger than (dare one say this here?) picking one's way through the morning's newspapers. The daily reading of virtually everyone under 40 -- and a fair few folk over that age -- now includes a blog or two, and this reflects as much the quality of today's bloggers as it does a techno-psychological revolution among readers of news and opinion....
...In the decade since their conception, blogs, once a smorgasbord of links, have evolved into vehicles for a fuller, more forceful and opinionated prose. Not all of it has been lovely to behold, or even edifying. Inevitably, there has been bombast, verbosity and exposure to the public eye of thoughts that, ideally, should have remained locked inside fevered heads. (The impact of blogs on public discourse has included, I contend, the emergence of a form of "oral blogging," noticeable at seminars and the like, where people who might once have asked brisk questions are now empowered by the blog form to hold forth at length, with little attempt at self-editing.)
The other change in the blog has, of course, been its mainstreaming. Blogging was once the province of the Nerd Without a Life (NWAL -- which, when pronounced aloud, sounds remarkably and appropriately like know-all). Today, while members of that tribe still abound, there are others who blog not because it is their only window on the world, but because blogging offers the opportunity of direct and immediate communion with those who would respond to their ideas. Call it intellectual "skin contact."
The online version of the article (Happy Blogiversary) includes a very worthwhile compendium of commentary, links and videos from weblog authors across the spectrum (you might be surprised by some of the names you see). I found these authors' commentaries to be as thought-provoking as the article itself. If you have a few minutes today, I recommend you take the time to read through it.
Weblogs, ten years old and counting...good stuff.