The loneliness of the long distance blogger

With no newsworthy accomplishments to dwell on, the weblog medium is taking a round of beatings this week – most extravagantly in the Financial Times Magazine, where the caustically titled feature, Time for the last post, is accompanied by a feedback blog all its own. Trevor Butterworth had little problem getting former editors of Gawker and Wonkette to unload about the relative futility of their intense link-seeking endeavors after serving time in those trenches. That feature contributed to a weekend-long pile-on that included a Slate financial story speculating on the Twilight of the Blogs as a prospectively lucrative endeavour, wacky neocon rag The Weekly Standard positing Web 2.0 Is Reminiscent of Marx (pictured), and The New York Times Magazine language columnist William Safire’s condescending salute to Blargon. It was exactly one year ago that blog triumphalism was operating at full steam, as the term “MSM” entered the parlance of the MSM, when amateur online apostles of both left and right American political rhetoric crowed about defrocking their respective threats against The Truth – the names of both Eason Jordan and Jeff Gannon are bound to appear in the blog edition of Trivial Pursuit. What’s gotten lost in the shuffle, unfortunately, is the hybrid of personal diary and sociocultural punditry that fueled much of the initial enthusiasm for the format. A piece in the Life section of the Saturday Star addressed The rarity of the black blogger, where Laina Dawes lamented the absence of those collective voices online in Canada – although any calculated attempt to change that dynamic usually undermines the creative potential of anyone who might be inspired to have their own unique experiences chronicled online in a generally scatterbrained fashion. Fortunately, Laina runs such a site herself, Writing is Fighting, a refreshing throwback to before blogs began the process of drowning in their own hype. (Warning: May contain a four-star review of the latest Judas Priest reunion album.)