I want to talk about something that many people are doing and even more people are talking about. Done by both porn stars and politicians, the novelty of this pastime has grown with increasing frequency. I’m talking, of course, about blogging. Why? What did you think I was talking about?
Over the past few years it has become more popular than ever to post musings online for the world to see. Numerous candidates in last year’s election cycle kept campaign blogs on their Web sites. But blogging isn’t just for famous people. Saturday The Register-Guard reported that MySpace – a social networking site – had replaced Google as the most popular site on the Internet (measured in page views per month). One of the more accessible features of MySpace allows users to keep blogs in addition to maintaining their directory profiles.
Some of these blogs are updated once in a blue moon. Some of these blogs are updated several times a day. Some of these blogs focus on day-to-day events in the author’s life, while others are full of pseudo-intellectual posturing in the forms of poems and essays.
Blogging, which originated through investigative Internet journalists who gained notoriety in the late ’90s, has been a gold mine for the parasites at the cable news networks. Now, instead of repeating what they read in newspapers, they merely have to hop online and repeat what they read in a number of prominent news-oriented blogs.
But the purpose of this column is not to chronicle the already well-documented blogging fad; rather, my job is to provide insight, analysis and pure speculation.
The first question most people have about any fad is, “Will it last?” In nine out of 10 cases, the answer is no. In this case, though, it’s difficult to say. People love to express themselves. Whether people will continue to write their innermost thoughts and bad poetry is not really the question. The question is whether they will continue to do so in an electronic, public forum, or if such ramblings will return to speckled composition books from which they once dwelled.
Personally, I don’t get the appeal of blogs because it seems like a lot of work for very little payoff. I mean, how many people actually read these things? With hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, the majority of bloggers must be sending their thoughts out into cyber-oblivion to die lonely deaths.
When I write something, I want as many people as possible to read it and hopefully respond. For instance, I wouldn’t continue to write this weekly column if the Emerald didn’t have a wide enough audience to keep a nearly constant stream of hate mail flowing through my inbox.
Perhaps that’s why I don’t get the appeal of blogs; they’re not something new to me. Publishing my random thoughts for public consumption is my job, the daily grind, so to speak. There are some differences, of course. I don’t get to write my own headlines; I have to write on a certain time frame and follow certain guidelines; I have to ask permission in order to use profanity (shit, piss, damn); also, I have to let other people cut up my words before they see the light of day. In exchange for those restrictions, however, I have access to a much larger audience than is available to the average blogger.
So to all you bloggers out there who want a bigger audience, all you need to do is have me killed and then submit samples of your work to the Oregon Daily Emerald on the third floor of the EMU.

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