In defense of blogging

"Blogs are full of crap."

I've heard this quite a few times over the last few weeks. This is especially ironic since I'm about to start working on Blogger- so I guess I'm partisan- I've generally managed to argue the complainants around to a different perspective: they aren't crap, they just weren't written for you.

Actually I tend to start the argument by saying there are two classes of blogs. The first group is made up of the utterly fabulous well published blogs that you read even though you might not realize they are blogs. Things like engadget or "I Can Has Cheezburger?" or digg (really, they are blogs). Or for something topical have a look at Paul Krugman's Blog (this year's Nobel prize winner in economics) or the NPR Plant Money Blog. Have a look through Wikipedia's List of Blogs and be amazed by how well written these blogs are. This kind of blog can be characterized by being a bit specialised. They have particular focus, they are generally written by experts or interested amatuers and the quality or writing and/or editing is a cut above the general mass of blogs. (Even I Can Has Cheezburger? is very consistent even if you don't like lolspeak- if nothing else the editing is effective.)

On the other hand the rest of the blogs seem to be made up of all sorts of dross: endless pokes and superpokes, mindless conversational noise and the dull minutae of boring lives. Its not the kind of blog you'd read, although maybe, its the kind of blog you'd write.

These sorts of blogs aren't written for you. They are written for friends of the poster and they are sort 'weakly' informational- intended to say "Hi, I'm alive, I'm doing some stuff." They are a way of maintaining community.

Community is about the people you communicate with in all the subtle ways we communicate. Not just explicit conversation but the observation of who is coming and who is going, the frilly underwear on a washing line or the car in the garage. Humans are naturally social animals and we automatically collect these observations into a model of the people with whom we interact. But our modern population is very mobile (we move to a different city for work, our parents retire to the sea side, our next door neighbour goes to University) and we lose these simple observational signals when someone is out of eyeshot. They are being replaced by more deliberate but equally insignificant communications- things like blog posts.

Piecing together the individual blog posts, pokes and chats gives us a shape of someone's life- in all its everydayness. And they largely hold no interest to someone who doesn't want to know the person. But if they are a friend who you'd like to keep in your extended community then the everyday minutiae are simple signal that they are alive and breathing.

The Google blog recently posted on this topic (Social Web: All about the small stuff) in what is a much more elegant discussion of this sort of idea.

Ultimately the complaint about blogs comes back to a more general point that Clay Shirky has so nicely made: its not a problem of content, its a problem of filtering. Or more crudely: if you don't like it don't read it- it wasn't meant for you anyway.