Tuesday, January 20, 2004
(6:50 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Observations on Blogging
First, Maddox, author of "The Greatest Page in the Universe," is absolutely right about Garfield. I have long believed that "reading the comic is like having a five-finger prostate examination." This brings me to my first observation about blogging:
- In general, only block quotes are allowed.
I'm not sure of the exact reasoning behind this unwritten law of the blogosphere. Apparently it's meant to give the impression of giving a "fair shake" to one's source, but to a recovering English major such as myself, it smacks of poorly written freshman-comp stuff. It's at its worst over at InstaPundit, where the art of blogging is reduced to its essence: snarky intro, block quote, "indeed." Is this the result of unconscious modelling on this blogger of bloggers? In any case, I'd like to see more shorter quotes, smoothly integrated into the text, with occasional parenthetical references, just like a good lit analysis paper. In the blogosphere, this should be simple, because it's a cut-and-paste job. That will also motivate people to go "read the whole thing" to make sure that the quotes are being represented fairly. Under the block quote regime, I doubt most links are followed.
- Most links are decorative.
I've written many posts where I attempted to put a link with virtually every word, and that's only a slight exaggeration of some blogposts. Some links are clearly unnecessary. The fascination with linking to Amazon every time one mentions a book is probably the best illustration. For another example, if you're talking about the general practices of a well-known blogger like Atrios or Josh Marshall, it's not strictly necessary to turn their name into a link -- everyone should know them by now, and they're on about 90% of blogrolls anyway. When linking to a specific post, it's another issue entirely, since the link is functional, but I think that many, if not most, links are inserted just to make the writer feel as if she is taking full advantage of the Internet medium.
- The infiltration of newbies is watering down blogging jargon.
For instance, there are some newer bloggers who apparently believe that the word "blog" refers to a particular post. That is not the case. There is already a word for this: "post." "Blog" refers to the entire weblog, which we will tentatively define as a single index page and its archives (that is, all posts that have ever appeared on a given index page).
In addition, I would say that "fisking" is a task that is often recommended, but rarely done -- I have noticed ever fewer interlinear glosses in my year of blogging, and that has coincided with casting an ever widening net in terms of blogs I read.
One piece of jargon of which I would like to dispose is the abbreviation "graf" for paragraph. It is even more annoying when preceded by an apostrophe. Josh Marshall seems to have done the most to popularize this piece of slang, and I think it needs to stop. "Key graf" is a derived term, meaning the paragraph that does the most to shed new light on the meaning of the whole, and it, too, must go. "Money quote" is the worst yet. (Tom Tomorrow has discussed this before -- I'm not going to link, so just take my word for it.)
- We still haven't quite figured out the function of the blogroll.
On the one hand, we have the "shout-out" model, typified by Atrios. This model emphasizes packing as many links as possible into a blogroll. On the other hand, we have the "regularly read" model, typified by The Weblog. I personally think that most blogrolls should be rolled back, because the implied recommendation is severely watered down when the list is so long that the author cannot possibly check all those blogs on a regular basis.
That's about it. Watch for an upcoming post by guest author Michael Hancock, a longtime friend of mine who is an aspiring professional composer and an amateur short-story writer. He wanted a place to rant, and I gave it to him.
