Robert Cringely has an meandering essay about blogging which includes the following,
I give credit to Dave Winer of Userland Software for inventing web logging, and I think the idea then was to publish, to share your thoughts with everyone else. But most people’s thoughts aren’t really worth sharing. Most web logs are little more than lists of annotated bookmarks and the value of those bookmarks can probably be best derived through a web aggregator, in which case people would be writing not to be read but to be counted, which isn’t nearly as much fun.
A lot of this comes down to production values, which is a subject those in the web log world tend to ignore because it is to their advantage to do so. There is a lot of bad television, but its packaging is such that we still seem to sit through the shows. Network TV spends perhaps $500,000 on an hour. How much do you spend on each web log entry? No wonder most web logs are so boring.
I disagree with Cringley both about blogging and about television.
I don’t know whether or not most people’s thoughts are worth reading, because most people frankly are not blogging. Most people still give me strange looks when I mention blogging.
Of the subset of technologically adept people who are blogging, I find most blogs to be pretty darn interesting. In fact the problem with blogging is the same as with television, IMO — the problem isn’t a dearth of quality content but rather so much quality content that it’s impossible to read or view even a small percentage of it. Aggregators help with the blog side, but since TV remains real time there will never be enough time to see all of the quality TV ever produced, even if you restrict viewing to pre-recorded network shows.
I imagine, for example, that Jim Roepcke’s weblog is the sort that I enjoy but that Cringley would probably find to be boring. Jim posts fairly regularly and mixes in occasional posts about current events, sports, his home rennovation project and his family. Jim and I are on opposite sides of most issues (including hockey which I never watch), but I find his blog and Jim’s ideas very interesting and worthwhile to consider.
I end up reading a lot of blogs published by friends, associates, co-workers and occasional enemies. One of the things that I think Cringely is wrong about is in assuming that great ideas only emerge from Great Thinkers (TM). As James Surowiecki notes in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, however, sometimes a group is much smarter than the smartest individual in that group.
I enjoy and tend to learn a lot more from the various and wide ranging opinions of what people write in their blogs than I do from reading elite opinion makers. I don’t understand at all Cringely’s trumpeting of the high production values of bad television — that’s precisely the problem. I much prefer to read the opinion of some blogger who may have poor grammar but an excellent take on some issue rather than the elite opinion columnist who is a wonderful wordsmith but whose opinion comes from some liberal or conservative template so predictable that I could have probably written the opinion piece for them based on their past views.