Finally saw the article on weblogs published in the Wisconsin State Journal a week or so ago. (John mentioned it to me, but I was too lazy to look it up. Then Amanda sent me the link.)
I guess I always knew I was just navel-gazing, but thank god there’s the State Journal to confirm it for me. They come out with the thesis right off the bat, calling weblogs possibly “the most profound example of narcissism,” which in this society is saying a lot.
I think the article is an interesting mix of utter cluelessness, and an understandable fear traditional media has developed now that the unwashed masses have the ability to publish without their help. “Oh crap. Now anyone can just write anything they want!“
Yes, there’s a lot of junk out there. But there’s also a lot of fascinating, well-written, provocative, thoughtful stuff that never would have seen the light of day without the weblog format. That should be worth celebrating, even in the State Journal.
(Not that they asked me. *sniff*)
I felt equally as slighted, since I’m once of the first Yahoo! hits for “liberal Madison blog”! I’m sad that they called Matt Drudge’s site a “proto-blog”, however: I was hoping Sparky would have registered the term as a trademark by now.
Get my lawyers on the phone!
yeah, it’s the same old article “they” keep writing about “blogging” – I mean, take any mass medium – TV, pornography, music, etc. – MOST OF IT is CRAP, and “oh gee, I’m gonna have to use my brain and decide which ones are good, and enjoyable, to ME???” – ugh. My theory is that newspapers and magazines, once they get online, they use the old “let’s write a blog article” just to get a bunch of bloggers to link to them, regardless of why, just so they can show more HITS to their advertisers. Like, the New York Times seems to do it every 5 weeks, like clockwork!
Okay, I don’t think that I understand what “navel gazing” means. Someone explain, please. I thought I knew, but clearly I don’t.
It means we’re all looking at Adam’s midsection! W00t! Shake it!!! Er…
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I go now.
I had to reread it caerfully to make sure it wasn’t one of the many similar articles just rerun with a few local paragraphs. And what’s up with the WSJ site not managing content links? Pfft.