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The ‘Oy’ of Blogging


By Andrew Binstock
December 1, 2006 — 
Sturgeon’s Law in its common formulation states that “90% of everything is crud.” This observation especially applies to the blogosphere. And here I am not referring to content alone (where the 90 percent figure seems rather conservative), but also to the underlying technology. But I’ll start with content.

You can quickly come to 90 percent of content if you add up the self-absorbed blogs of tweens, teens and college kids; the hate blogs; and, of course, the many, many abandoned blogs. Of the remaining 10 percent, you then eliminate topics that don’t interest you. You now are way under 1 percent—yet you have literally hundreds of blogs to choose from. If software development is your thing, you’ll want to skim off the blogs by engineers or CEOs who are shills for their companies; those who evangelize their pet technology; and most especially, those who are always attacking or condemning some person, some company or some technology. Finally, you’re in the clear, with the handful of truly useful blogs.

You then must accept that most of these blogs are only intermittently maintained. Many have frequent entries apologizing for not having posted in weeks. Eliminate these, if you will, and you have the true short list of active, intelligent blogs on your favorite topic. Try as I might, I can’t expand my list to more than 15 blogs whose new posts I read right away. Of these, exactly two make all the searching worthwhile: Jon Udell’s “Jon’s Radio” and Larry O’Brien’s “Knowing .NET.” What distinguishes them is the frequency of posts, their consistent quality and especially a personal intimacy. These bloggers share their pain, their quest for solutions and the answers they find. Time spent with them is never unrewarded. All of which makes me very skeptical when I go to blogs that sport dozens, even hundreds, of links in the blogroll panel. To admire so many blogs suggests a lack of discrimination.

Now, to presentation. It’s hard to think of a medium less designed for real communication than a blog. Nearly every one of the blog systems today use software from one of four or five companies that provide a basic design with a selection of slightly varied templates. However, they all use the same static paradigm: a main panel of text with one or more additional columns of predictable material—generally a bio, a blog roll and a calendar linking to the very same blog you’re looking at. Gosh. How about active content? Maybe a dash of Web 2.0? How about sidebar links to other things? Or links that tell you where they lead when you hover, so you don’t keep clicking on definitions of terms in Wikipedia or other silly nonsense? How about using Google’s translation engine to provide translations automatically at post time? Or showing me links in the current blog that refer back to the present entry? Or showing me the number of people who have visited this particular post? Even getting posted comments straight would be helpful: Why not thread them as newsgroups do instead of having one comment refer to a previous comment that must be guessed. Come on, guys, none of this is hard, yet (to my knowledge) most blogging software offers few, if any, of these features.

Related technology has its own challenges. The one technically advanced portion of the blogosphere is the ability to federate blog feeds easily. RSS and Atom have made this simple, and they are good tools for developers to explore. (By the by, a remarkably good book on programming these technologies is “RSS and Atom in Action” by Dave Johnson.)

However, using these technologies and the tagging mechanisms in Digg, del.icio.us and Technorati requires that bloggers dip into a whole other world unrelated to their core competence and to master its ins and outs. Little of this world is laid out in simple terms, and most of the technology providers assume that bloggers already know how to use them. (For example, go to digg.com and try to find out how to place a Digg button on your blog entries.) Once you’ve got all that set up and working, you can then spend your time fighting off comment spam.

So, putting aside the content issues, it’s safe to say that blogs are predictable in their presentation, limited in their capabilities, difficult to set up right and a pain to maintain actively. It’s no wonder that so many blogs are eventually abandoned. For a technology that supposedly will democratize the world, it has a long way to go. May progress come soon.

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works. Read his blog at binstock.blogspot.com.


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