Have been greatly exaggerated.
My buddy Jeff, fresh into the DC blog scene, went off on a rant a couple of weeks ago.
Blogs used to be beautiful. Not all of them, of course; not even on average. But the specular highlights outshone the grey pall that covered the rest of it. Now writers of real thought and talent are morphing into partisan hacks — no offense meant to anybody — because they’ve been subsumed by the machine. They’ve been subsumed by the status quo.
While there’s some truth to what he’s saying about political blogs, it’s more an indictment of politics than of blogs, themselves. While it may not mean much in the grand scheme of things, there is beauty in the way the RBF, for instance, has given normal folks a means to focus on fitness.
This is going to have knock-on effects more profound than a new space for talking heads to listen to themselves.
And it’s not just the RBF. Blogs are letting companies connect with customers, letting musicians collaborate despite the tyrrany of distance. Blogs are beautiful.
Politics is ugly.
And boy, did one of my fellow DC-based bloggers give me shit for calling her a partisan hack. Despite my “no offense” disclaimer, she took it VERY personally.
Yeah, the land of political blogs can turn into a maelstrom fairly quickly. Neither side is immune – both the liberals and conservatives tend to go out on extreme tangents that often turn into personal attacks between commenters – and the signal-to-noise ratio is getting absurd. And the politics of the personal seems to be starting with an ever shorter fuse – as a fellow DC resident, I’m well aware of the overly-sensitive nature of the flock down here.
While I think that going all the way to fully moderated blogs and bulletin boards is perhaps a bit much (though most bloggers I know tend to moderate comments), it can be quite tough to find the gems for all the silt.
What about the spam blogs? Have you seen those? Just pages and pages of gibberish text, interspersed with 100’s of links to typical spam junk (g@mbling, pr0n, onloin meds, etc).
I think of political blogs as just another form of spam blogs. Political spam. Gibberish interspersed with links to other political spam blogs.
Well said, Bill. It is going to take a few years to weed out the riff-raff, but eventually the true beauty of things will be apparent.
Spam bloggers suck. I’ve gotten a few of those as well, Jon.
Long live RBF and other great bloggers.