Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Bloggety Blogging



There is a season to everything and right now the season is to wonder what blogging is all about. The egotistical version of that one is of course what I might be doing with this blog if anything. I'm struggling against the siren calls of becoming an investigative blogger who finds out what JimJeff GannonGuckert was really doing in the White House during the overnight visits, and against the terrible ambitions of wanting to write so well that people drop their innards into my paypal collection basket (which I don't have, yet). Then some dark and windy nights I shed large tears over my inability to say anything at all and over my emptiness. Really, over my mediocrity. A mediocre goddess is a dreadful thing to be.

In other words, I'm completely normal! A leeetle bit schizoid but otherwise right at the median, mean and mode. Except for the qualifiers and the rigid little academic bits. Those I will get rid of, one day. But the question of blogging remains and it even has a wider importance.

The Google has started mixing blogs with newspapers on their news page. The problem is not with sites like Kos but with some other blogs that I have accessed through Google News. The writing is from an elementary school class and the information is wrong. How does the system determine which sources are deemed as worthy of inclusion? And if this sort of thing becomes more common what will it do to the already almost nonexistent respect people have towards blogs?

If the system uses readership figures to decide on inclusion it is bound to catch some sites which are really chatrooms or places where like-minded people meet, and some of those places can be pretty far off the mainstream. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it smells odd to have New York Times and a blog of this type ranked equally.

These questions could reflect the infancy stage of blogging or the anarchy of the blogosphere. Perhaps everything will be formalized and codified in the future. I'm not sure if I like that, either, because it will be those in power who end up determining these things. Still, we need something like a gigantic telephone catalog for all the blogs out there. The yellow pages equivalent at least.

Which brings me to my last musing on this topic: the impossibility of reading all the good blogs out there or even the good lefty blogs or the good feminist blogs. I can't do it anymore, not unless I quit working and eating and writing my own blog. This is a real loss and I have found no good solution to it.