Rambling Rhodes

Another Dipshit Who Doesn't Get It

Will the day ever come when an intelligent criticism of ThunderJournals is penned? Perhaps, but not by this guy.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then Fred Khumalo and I should feel very flattered indeed.

Hm, this almost has the air of a Nick Coleman-esque column.

Every day there are 120000 new blog sites registered — a staggering 43 million a year. According to blog search engine Technorati, there are already 70 million blog sites registered worldwide. Admittedly the majority of the bloggers get bored rather quickly and don’t bother to update their sites, but that’s still 70 million people (higher than the population of the UK) who desperately want to be columnists.

Who desperately want to be columnists? WTF? What kind of suicidal leap of logic is that? Bloggers want to be columnists? Puh-lease. I'm willing to bet a good chunk of those 70 million bloggers don't even know what a "columnist" is, and some might even think columnists build Roman-style pillars for a living.

Listen up, dipshit. Very few bloggers aspire to be columnists. Most bloggers, I'm betting, aspire only to blog and chronicle their lives and thoughts online, for themselves mainly, and for anyone who happens by a distant second.

It’s comforting to know that, should Fred or I decide to take a sabbatical, there’s no shortage of people available to hold the fort. The only snag is the quality, or lack of it.

Oh, brother. Here we go again with the "lack of blog quality" snooze.

Allow me to explain what I mean. I used to play air guitar with a band called Deep Purple. My playing was perfect, I had attitude and I even smashed my air guitar at the end of the number. The reason I played air guitar is that I couldn’t play real guitar very well so I was forced to dwell in this fantasy world where my guitar playing meant something only to me. I should point out that this was years ago when I was still young and foolish. These days I play air tenor saxophone, which is far more challenging.

See, now, this is what qualifies as, er, quality. This is quality journalism. Air guitars and air saxophones make up a solid and quality journalistic offering.

Most blog sites are the air guitars of journalism. They’re cobbled together by people who wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism, mainly because they have very little to say.

And you know what? Most bloggers don't even want a job in journalism. Many probably don't even know what journalism IS. They just want to carve out a little spot in cyberspace where they can pontificate to the digital ether. Hell, when I started blogging in early 2002, I did so mainly to strengthen my writing skills. It's since morphed into an entirely different beast that I probably couldn't kill if I wanted to.

It’s rather sad how many people think the tedious minutiae of their lives will be of any interest to anyone else.

It’s even sadder when someone reads them.

Well, Mr. Sadler Saddington, here are a few quick numbers to put in your sad pipe and sad smoke: In 2002, a good day consisted of 18 blog visitors; yesterday I had over 9,000. Of that 9,000, a goodly portion came to my blog looking for a now infamous picture of my own ass, if SiteMeter is to be believed, and I have no reason to question it. That's not sad. . . that's fucking hilarious. In fact, in April, this ThunderJournal tallied nearly 240,000 hilariously funny visitors, people who would rather look at a picture of my ass than read your shit. That's about the most amusing thing I can possibly imagine.

Many bloggers prefer to remain anonymous and with good reason. The content of their sites is so moronic that even their best friends would disown them if they knew they were the authors. As with most things in life, something that costs nothing is usually worth nothing and that puzzles me. Are there really 70 million bloggers out there hoping that their writing talents will be recognised, or is this just another example of modern narcissism?

This from a man whose writings drip with the seminal thickness of his own perceived self-importance. He's a fine one to quip about narcissism. Besides that, how can someone be narcissistic AND anonymous?

SIDENOTE: I'm narcissistic as hell. See also, my visitor traffic bragging above.

Unlike the world of newsprint, there are no rules out there in the blogosphere and that makes it a very confusing place for the consumer.

We need rules, dagnabit. RULES, I tells ya. If ya don't have rules, alls ya got is confusion, see? Rules! Bring out the rules! People are confused! Can't you see? CONFUSED! Where's my toilet brush!?

I have no objection to reading my Sunday Times on the Internet because I know the content has been through the same process as the print edition.

Process, people! We need process! Guided by RULES. RULES BASED PROCESSES! AND WHERE'S MY DAMNED toilet BRUSH!

I do, however, object to some anonymous, scrofulous nerd pumping meaningless drivel into cyberspace at all hours of the day and night simply because he can’t find a girl to sleep with him.

Do guys like this even have a passing familiarity with the concepts of free speech and free press? You'd think a "journalist" would have at least heard of the terms. He objects to all this free speech-ifying nonsense going on all the time, gosh-darnit. And notice how bloggers are apparently all male. And undersexed males at that. I don't know about you, but I've read more than a few blogs written by females in my day. Thank goodness this guy's column was subject to the rules and processes of the newsroom, so good, QUALITY content like this can be made available.

These are the sort of wackos who gun down their fellow students at university.

Wha? Leaving aside the broken sentence structure (RULES! PROCESSES!), this guy actually lumps all bloggers with the gun-toting university shooter crowd.

I visited a site the other day that was so hideously racist that it would have qualified its publisher for a long spell in prison if it had appeared in print.

Wait a minute. Racism, although repugnant, is not, I believe, illegal. Racist speech and publications, likewise, are deplorable, but protected forms of expression.

So what’s the difference? How come newspapers and magazines have to carry the names of their editors and publishers and watch their content and websites don’t?

Oh, please. How many unsigned editorials are published every day in newspapers nationwide? Aside from that, newspapers and magazines are BUSINESSES, whereas blogging is, for most, an amusing hobby.

I’m told that it’s possible to track down the author of any offensive website and perhaps that’s what the government should be doing instead of looking at legislation to gag legitimate publications.

Who is this guy? The government should be tracking down offensive Web site authors? Jeezum Crow. Leaving aside the totalitarian underpinnings of such a Big Brother approach to Internet oversight, can you imagine the sheer costs associated with going after offensive bloggers? Being offensive is at the heart of, roughly, 99.99999999999999 percent of all blogs. This guy has gone from amusingly strange to catagorically demented.

Better still, maybe it’s time the print journalists named and shamed some of the more offensive anonymous bloggers and published their physical addresses. Then I can start a blog site called printrevenge.com and bore you all with the details.

I can only hope this shithead is, at some level, joking. Actually, no, wait, I hope he's serious. I'd love to see print mediums start "naming and shaming" bloggers most of their readership neither A) knows about or B) even remotely cares about. That would be HI-larious. Maybe not "quality journalism," but hilarious all the same.

Posted by Ryan at May 7, 2007 11:42 AM | TrackBack