Saturday, January 20, 2007

And there shone a bright new star

For a while now my favourite rant has been about private diary writers who’ve gone public on the Internet and so believe that their every thought and opinion counts. Including myself.

Having misspent the entire afternoon looking up blogs and blogging, I’ve been disarmed. There are as many blogs as there are stars in the sky. You might as well be writing privately in a book on your desk in your room with the door closed.

And the afternoon wasn’t entirely misspent either. It was a great exercise in re-sizing my picture of myself, as is reading the Economist Style Guide or New York Times columnists. An intimidating number of the bloggers are erudite, incredibly well-informed and update daily (almost hourly, in some cases). At least half of them must have regular, unrelated jobs – where do they get the time? What sort of jobs are these? And how does one get one of those?

It’s also a bad idea to invite friends and relatives to your blog – they know that if you have the time to update, you bloody well have the time to reply to their emails. In my defence, I say to them, I’ve done a lot worse to you. And anyway it’s in the mail.

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