Putting a spoke in the bandwagon’s wheels

I’ve been trying to keep my mouth shut (well, except in other bloggers’ comments) about the recent spate of “Aren’t blogs marvellous? Blogs are the big news story of the past year! Blogs are the big news story of the coming year! Bloggers are journalists! Journalists are bloggers! Everyone’s a blogger now! Blogs can save the world (possibly)! Is that a blogging bandwagon coming our way?” type articles, mainly because they get on my nerves and irritate the hell out of me. More to the point, I’m choosing not to annoy you with yet another bout of verbal frothing at the mouth about such matters, as I realise that anyone who’s been visiting this site for a while will already be well aware of the terrible effect such pointless puff pieces have on my fragile state of mind, and that you must be bored to the back teeth of reading such diatribes.

Take a deep breath, then.

BBC News - who seem to have been at the forefront of the banal blogging article just recently, so much so that they can now list such stories on the right-hand side of the page in a ‘Web Logs’ category - have today published a new report claiming that Blog reading explodes in America. However, everything’s relative, and it seems that ‘exploding’ might be a somewhat pejorative term, because check the small print and you’ll find the following statistic:

“Despite the explosive growth, more than 60% of online Americans have still never heard of blogs, the survey found.”

And that’s not all:

“Only 7% of the 120 million US adults who use the internet had created a blog or web-based diary.”

So probably not quite as popular as watching the latest episode of 100 Greatest Police Chases Resulting in Death or Serious Injury, then. Or maybe endless repeats of Friends.

Hopefully, by the time we get into the second week of the new year, it will have begun to dawn on the lazy journalists writing these stories that the phenomenon they believe is at the cutting edge of the zeitgeist thingummybob isn’t actually much of a phenomenon at all. That’s a good thing for them, because it means that they’ll be able to resuscitate these same stories twelve months from now: “Blogging! It’s what everyone’s been talking about in 2005! And in 2006!”

Still, I’m pleased that the above quotes prove what I’ve always maintained until I’m blue in the face. Try asking the people standing next to you in the bus queue what a ‘blog’ is, and I suspect that you’ll mostly be greeted by vacant stares or responses such as: “Um, dunno. Is it a small marsupial?”

Oh, and it would really help this particularly jaded reader if news organisations could finally decide whether they’re going to call them ‘weblogs’ or ‘web logs’. Personally, I prefer the former, because the latter comes across rather like your parents referring to that band you like as a ‘popular beat combo’.

I’m not anti weblogs. Really, I’m not. Even I can see that such a stance would be a bit silly coming from, er, a weblog. I’m just anti vacuous hype, that’s all. [link via grayblog]