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]