Anti-Spam - I went to
Anti-Spam - I went to this blog panel discussion on Friday, focused on the usual sort of blog discussion: will blogs supplant old media? (no), is there any prospect for making money from blogging? (possibly), etc. This panel discussion was marred by the absence of Glenn Reynolds and James Lileks whose flights were unfortunately canceled (see their comments on the airport experience here and here. Here is a pretty good summary of the events of the discussion.
I thought the discussion was, at least with respect to what I was looking for, a bit disappointing. The only kind of blogs I really care about are the political blogs. Of course, I think the other kinds of blogs are very interesting for many people, and I'm glad that they exist, but they are part of an entirely different movement. The political blogs, I believe, are more relevant to the sort of discussion the panel was trying to have, and they were not represented. The true blog status of the websites that were represented was doubtful, as admitted by the panelists. In addition, the "discussant" from the Idler (the publication running the meeting) was not a blogger, and thus was not as familiar with the material being discussed as a true blogger would be.
One thing I found very disturbing was the notion, brought up repeatedly, that bloggers (or websites as a whole) need editors. Journalists need editors, because 1) their readers paid for the publication as a whole, and every article within needs to be up to the standards of the whole, 2) an article is intended to be the finished product of a line of thought, not a stop along the way, 3) mistakes in newspaper articles cannot be easily corrected, and damage the reputation of the entire publication, and 4) the publication is created for the readers, and must be written to their satisfaction, not that of the writer.
On the other hand, to me, the point of a blog is that it is one person's (or several people's) opinion, presented in a tentative, informal, and evolving manner. Bloggers can change their minds, make mistakes, and take other viewpoints into account. The metaphor of a blog as a conversation is thrown about a lot, but I would say that it is not a metaphor, but simple truth. The advantage of a blog is the chance to quickly respond to someone else's comments in a thoughtful and public way. (This could be one of the reasons the blog phenomenon did not take off until it did: there needed to be a critical mass of bloggers, interlinked and ready to respond to each other.) A conversation does not need an editor. By the spontaneous nature of a blogger's posting, and the blogger's willingness to respond to comments on his or her posts, the blogger declares that a post is not the end of a train of thought, but somewhere in the middle. A blog is a chronicle of the evolution of ideas.
In addition, being free of charge, a blog is not created for the benefit of anyone else but the blogger. I find that people often lose sight of this fact, as well, in references such as the term "blogorrhea," referring to bloggers who post too often or who write posts that are too long to be interesting to the speaker's conception of a blog reader. First of all, I like long posts, as perhaps is evidenced by this blog, and I am sure there are at least some other readers who agree with me, given the popularity of such sites as The Volokh Conspiracy, which tends toward long posts. But even if a post is so long and pointless that no one would care to read it, this is not a reason to suggest that bloggers need editors. I hold the sentiment, and have seen it echoed in most blogs that I read, that a blog is for the blogger, not for the readers. If the readers don't like a certain blog, then they don't have to read it.
In this sense, a blog is the "anti-spam." If readers were paying for blogs, their content would have to measure up to a certain consistent standard. Or, if readers were being forced to read blogs, if blogs were delivered to their door every morning, or were emailed to them whether they wanted it or not. However, neither of these conditions are true. Blogs are simply sitting out on the internet, not advertising to anyone. They are a passive media. If someone wants to read a blog, he or she needs to actively search for it, and can choose when and what to read. If a post is long and boring, the reader can skip over it. Blogs are not an imposition on a reader, they are a source of information that anyone may freely seek out, or not seek out, as they choose.