Embarassingly Stupid

This long post dedicated to "Blogs are dead" memes is a monuement to monolithic, elitist tripe. There is so much wrong in this post that it becomes difficult where to start. I will leave it to others (Lileks?) to take this post down with a good Fisking, but the spotty and shoddy selective research just jumps out at you.

Note the complete inaccuracies of this final graph...

FT.com / Arts & Weekend - Time for the last post: "And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news."

#1. "...dismal fate of blogging..." Really? Seems that blogs are garnering more and more readers, advertisers and credibility. Old Media is laying off and cutting back. So this 'fate' is both pre-mature and the result of arrogant old-media elitism. Uh... goodbye.

#2. "...need to post four or five times a day, five days a week..." Really? Many respectable blogs post a few times a week, and some post 10-15 times a day. This kind of generalization is just lame on the face of it. False statement as fact.

#3. "...closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence..." No, literary obsolescence is old-media posturing of "shut up and listen while we tell you what we have decided you need to know. Oh, and by the way, we will decieve, truncate, cajole and downright lie and you better just sit there and take it. Morons." The new media invites discussion and opposite points of view being aired. It means questions about research, sources and facts... you know... that pesky stuff the writer above leaves out.

#4. "...nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts..." So? Other than the cute allegory of 'virtual tomb' this statement says nothing. Ad Hominem statement that has absolutely no substance. Just because OM crap sits and yellows on shelves, what relation does that have to relevance to any given situation? It was written... it was shelved. So? It is written, posted, linked to and forgotten in most instances... except when you need to recall it, punch it in Google and there you are. That's called realtime research, and the virtual tomb has a billion cracks of entry. The 'shelved and yellowing' OM crap doesn't.

#5. ...word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners..." Projection anyone? This guy writes a jillion paragraphs with little substance, a lame 'gotcha' attempt or two, hand selected situations spun to support his pre-decided outcome, and then lectures bloggers on being word-weary. Yeah right. Word-weary is what came to mind while reading this post... I actually had to come back to it and try to forge through it two times. The OM is always holding their "we have editors" meme up to show the blogosphere how 'real' journalism works. Guess this guys editor was on vacation... or working on his own blog.

Man, these old guys are scared. So they think they will make themselves feel better by hunkering down together and pumping each other up with tales of how the 'enemy' isn't all that tough. Yeah, we can beat 'em. Yeah, we have editors. Yeah... they are in a quagmire of a word-weary cemetary. Yeah, we still have readers. Yeah...

Jerks like this just make it easier.