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"Blogs" are ruining the internet

An essay by Tjaart Blignaut
Completed On Tuesday, September 19, 2006 6:52 PM

Introduction

When I first heard about a new web technology called "blogs", I was puzzled. I had been off the internet for quite some time and had no idea whatsoever what this term is supposed to mean. By the time I reconnected for the first time "blogomania" had struck. There were "blogs", "blawgs", "bleghs" and who knows what else. I made the last one up by the way, but the chances are you didn't even notice. At first I saw this as an oppurtunity for Physicists , Chemists, and highly informed people to post progress reports on new technologies they were researching. A great way for very busy people with very intellectual and interesting topics to enlighten the world? So I thought, but upon finding that at least 70% of my google searches were "blogs", which had information that was unreliable to say the least, and more commonly opinions about any given topic you can think of.

Where does the flaw start?

The name !

The word itself is in error. Here is a dictionary definition from wordweb. This is only one of the six definitions, but the only one were interested in, since we are not talking about wood:

Log. Noun. A written record of events on a voyage (of a ship or plane)

Okay so how does this relate to computer technology. A chat log contains a record of events and spoken words in a chronological order. It is merely a reference tool. Logs are often produced by installers, network daemons, and various other applications in order to find errors or security compromises to that given application.

In conclusion the word "blog"(weblog) is out of context with both the dictionary and the general consensus in the computer world. To be quite honest, the word itself shakes the fiber of my being, and I feel like setting something on fire when I hear it. I use double quotes to refer to "blogs" throughout this text.

Who's "blogging" ?

Everyone including your neighbours dog, your doctor and that guy who always picks his nose in the car behind you. The fact is that blogging is lowering the quality of the web. If you paste your opinion into a well formed essay, spell check it, format it and upload it onto an original (well as original as you are capable of) web site, it automatically becomes web content, and people read it and Can then devise opinions based on what is given. If however you write daily opinions and comments on world events such as war in Elbonia(see Dilbert) , you are doing what at least every one in 20 people on this planet can do: Form an opinion and paste it in a text editor.

So everybody can "blog", and the irony is that the more "bloggers" there are, the less likely it is that your "blog" will be spotted amongst the millions of other "blogs". Here are some staggering statistics. (Note that when I said staggering I already knew it would be, without having to check first.)

Google search results for Blog: 2,600,000,000 for blog ()
Google search results for "free blog" : 1 - 10 of about 28,600,000 for "free blog"
Google search for "my blog site": Results 1 - 10 of about 162,000

Searching for "war in iraq": Results 1 - 10 of about 29,200,000

Searching for "war in iraq" blog: Results 1 - 10 of about 15,800,000

Conclusion : 54 Percent of of results on this topic are "blogs"!

There are more web sites explaining "blogs" than there are for "Quantum Mechanics", which only got a shameful 10,300,000 results, and should by all means be more important than unproven biased opinions on templated web pages. To further bring out perspective try searching for something like "Free music". "blogs" even beat pornography, which the web is infamous for. "Porn" only got 155,000,000 results, falling far short from "blogomania". Internet pornography has been around since the beginning of the internet, and I'm using this example to illustrate that the quality of "blog" content can't possible be good, because it's been developed in such a short time, not to promote pornography. It was known about 2 or 3 years back that pornography covered more than 60% of web space. This has obviously changed. Do we really want an internet filled mostly with malformed opinions about daily events and crude pornography? I think not.

The good "blogs" don't make up for it

I'm sure there are good "blogs" out there, but the fact that there is so many throws you in a pool of at least 1 Million other people, and the chances that people will get sick of "blogs" before reading yours is very high.

English Please!

I have read blog entries that start with no introduction, contain no facts in the body and draw no conclusions in the end. Basically they are just there so that people can say : "Hey, I've got a blog". The next sentence they utter is their exhaustingly long URL.

"blogs" rarely contain good english sentences. To prove this assumption, I went on to some popular "blogs" and found these wonerful english sentences:

"Sure you are limited by size of file, but so what." - This was the second actual "blog" that showed up in a Goolge search for "blog"

"Blogs" and promotion.

Is this "blogger real?". Ask yourself that interesting question next time you see a "blog" promoting a product or company. How hard is it for a company employee to get paid to set up a fake "blog" to promote the products and the company? Not hard at all! Bob from Michigan, the person you always see on ads professing how great some product is. The irony is that we in South Africa are supposed to believe in a wild opinion from Bob in Michigan.

A proposed solution

To be honest I am not very keen on writing more. I can elaborate about spelling errors, but I'm sick of browsing "blogs". Maybe "blogs" should be on port 81, and be accessed with a blog:// link. This way you could filter out all the homemade web content that bloggers post so carelessly on the web. Many agree that blogs are clogging up the information superhighway, I think that web content should be accessible to all, but then responsibility has to be excersized when adding content. The web is about content. Spammers and bloggers and schammers don't respect this fundamental element of the web that makes it succesful. E-mail has practically been ruined, and we are probably going to have to fill in captcha's everytime we send an e-mail in the near future. I would personally rather do that than have to delete 100 spam emails at a time.

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