Persistence is Evil

Interestingly enough, the previous entry discussed a positive spin on the growing role of technology to "index" our states-of-mind at various points in time. Clearly, there are benefits to a system this organized and effective at consuming raw content.

Naturally, not everyone share's this zeal. James A C Joyce entry titled "Why your Movable Type blog must die",a topic that will surely become famous post for the next week to come, about his main issues with Blogging as a whole and those that perpetuate them. Surely, it is worth the read. One should be warned that the nature of his presentation is somewhat rough and one-sided which tends to weaken the majority of his points, but nonetheless there's some truth to what he has identified.

To summarize the highlights, here are the headings and some comments on them.

You are all pretentious twats

You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky.

Although there is undoubtedly a glut of blogs that exist solely to promote one individual and their opinions, I don't know that it's fair to say that all sites fit into this category. Even if personal sites that serve solely as diaries, is this actually a problem? Leaving out the value-judgement, these diaries provide a unique and personal look into the thoughts of many people. Surely, reading any blog is voluntary, allowing anything questionable or objectionable to simply be ignored.

You make up irritating jargon for the sake of it

The word 'weblog' is acceptable. 'Blog' is just about tolerable.

There are certainly a great deal of terms that have been created. I can definitely admit that some of the terms identified have been used here from time to time. However, it is human nature to name that which is not named, so it seems only reasonable that new terms flow from our interaction with a "new" medium..

All of your blogs talk about the same crap

It is clear that power laws are in effect when it comes to the distribution of links in the blogging network. This arrangement tends to expose a great deal of individuals to a similar series of information. The entry points out a number of topics that are covered continuously by a variety of blogs. Unfortunately, the majority of those items are newsworthy beyond the blogging topology.

You are ******* stupid

The idiocy of Movable Type bloggers is most evident when they become emotional about a topic. When this occurs, they tend to make all kinds of massive, grating rhetorical faux pas such as false analogies.

Emotion is part of the topic, which I think is a large part of the problem with this interpretation. Of course, people will always make mistakes in their use of prose and judgement. Conjuring analogies and illustrating other concepts literally can be difficult for almost anyone. Considering that the blogging world is not subject to the editorial process common in journalism, a certain degree of flexibility must be allowed. In fact, the chosen tone and implications of the original rant could be viewed as "problematic" for the same reasons.

Your blog is ******* up Google

This is what makes your blogs worse than useless. Previously, they were merely bundles of listless rambling scattered around the Web. Now their effects are positively toxic, choking search engines as they grow continuously and invasively.

The position taken here is one purely of utility. The belief of the author seems to be that Google must be "protected" from pollution. This is a very troublesome position considering the fundamental purpose of the search engine: to index the web. Many people have come to rely on Google asa central resource for locating information. In this regard, the growth of Google to incorporate a wider array of data can lead to issues locating information. Unfortunately, thiswas bound to happen and the responsibility lies in Google's hands to make its search algorithms more efficient at filtering data that can be considered redundant or extraneous.