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Blog haters have little idea what they rage against

Blogging is turning 10 this year. At least that’s what the headlines say. Time to break out the cake and candles? For the blogging tribe, it’s more like time to get out the red pencil, and dispute the premise of the anniversary itself.

That’s hardly surprising. Blogging is all about the amateur crowd outsmarting the lone professional. So blogging’s milestone, like every other aspect of the phenomenon, is open to debate. When the Wall Street Journal at tempted to celebrate what it called the blogiversary, the feature evoked a torrent of argument.

The newspaper wrote that Jorn Barger, who started his Robot Wisdom weblog in 1997, is “regarded by many” as the “first blogger.” But who are these “many”? If a blogger had written that phrase, it would have come with a link to the source. The Wall Street Journal’s unsupported claim, though hedged with admissions of other contenders to the “first blogger” title, only reinforced the feeling, endemic among bloggers, that the mainst ream media just can’t get anything right.

In truth Mr. Barger was the first writer to use the term weblog to describe a website that featured short posts linking to items elsewhere on the Web, organised in reverse chronological order. Later Peter Merholz jokingly shortened the word to ’blog and the elision took hold, though the vestigial apostrophe vanished.

But to name Mr. Barger or anyone else as the first blogger is a futile exercise. Like so many online innovations, blogging didn’t spring fullgrown from some visionary’s fertile forehead. It evolved as a bundle of online publishing practices; and as software developers created tools to make those practices easier, the form and tools advanced together.

Today, the blog feels obvious and intuitive. It’s the default format for a website. Companies use blogs to open conversations with customers and among employees. Individuals use them to pursue obsessions, jumpstart careers or chronicle their lives for family and friends.

Hundreds of millions of blogs have been begun since the explosion of free blogging services at the turn of the millennium. Most have since been abandoned. Still, the blog search company Technorati tracks over a million new posts a day, and even a conservative reading of current statistics finds the number of active bloggers in the millions, an outpouring of globally readable self-expression unprecedented in human history.

But blogging’s useful characteristics were not always so obvious. Those of us who were building websites in the mid-1990s did not see them. We struggled to help visitors find the “new stuff” on our static home pages. We scratched our heads over what to do with the stuff once it wasn’t so new. Paper had never posed such questions.From the dawn of blogging it’s been tempting for established professionals to reject blogging as trivial and unreliable. Epitomising this stance most recently is Tom Wolfe — who, in a brief essay accompanying the Wall Street Journal’s blog birthday celebration, dismissed the blogosphere as “a universe of rumours.” To support this charge, he cited an ina ccuracy in Wikipedia’s entry about himself. Of course, the online encyclopaedia is not a blog at all. But critics such as Mr. Wolfe can’t be bothered making distinctions. He admitted that Wikipedia isn’t “strictly a blog” but claimed it “shares the genre’s characteristics,” and dismissed a universe of blogs on the basis of a single Wikipedia inaccuracy — which was, naturally, immediately corrected. If it’s online, apparently, it’s all the same, and all worthless.

Most journalists’ understanding of the nature of blogging has been circumscribed by a focus on how it might affect our profession. We write about whether blogging can be journalism, we worry about whether bloggers can or will replace journalists, and we miss the real stories.

Here’s one example. Earlier this year, 38-year-old Canadian writer Derek Miller, an avid blogger at Penmachine.com since 2000, began blogging extensively about his experience with colon cancer. On one level, this was the sort of thing so many of blogging’s critics detest — what the Wall Street Journal described as “thoughts that, ideally, should have remained locked inside fevered heads.”

In this example, as in countless others, we can see the unique way in which blogging has redrawn the line between private communication and mass publication. When anyone can publish anything, the moment of truth isn’t when you press the post button, it’s when others choose to read what you’ve said.

So what, exactly, are Mr. Wolfe and other blogging detesters worried about? We’re not going to run out of web space. And each of us still decides how to spend our time. What price is the world paying for the existence of blogging’s universal soapbox? Unless someone has figured out how to make you read a blog when you don’t want to, I don’t see one. Is there a benefit? Ask Mr. Miller. Ask millions. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

(Scott Rosenberg is a co-founder of Salon.com and author of Dreaming in Code. He blogs at wordyard.com)

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