Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog



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First, even though Fulford is a vastly superior professional journalist, note that there are at least two typos in his lede: Available to anyone who has something to say, blogs have become politically powerful and culturally influential. But geting to the good stuff often means sifting through virtual reams of moronic musings Read that second sentence again. Doesn't that apply to every form of media in existence since the beginning of time? 10,000 years ago, our cave-dwelling ancestors perused cave paintings complaining, "Ya gotta sift through a heck of a lotta cheap Sabre-toothed Tigers to get to a good Mammoth pic." Fulford then begins with a long, dull story about Andrew Coyne ditching his comments: So one day last spring, he did what many would consider unthinkable. He banned public comments from his blog. At one stroke, he defied the libertarian code of the blogosphere and revealed its chronic weakness: the limited intelligence of many who routinely read blogs and post letters to them for public display. Yeah, 'cause the people who routinely read the National Post -- all eight of them -- are freakin' geniuses. That's its strength, you see? Fulford goes on about this for some time and he's full of shit, the so-called "libertarian code of the blogosphere" (whatever that is) allows you to do whatever you want on your blog. Anything. Lots of people don't permit comments. It's not unthinkable, it's fairly common. Fulford goes on to allow Coyne to describe his unremarkable problem: "As the numbers have grown, the quality has declined. The comments have frankly gone to seed, overrun with western separatists, Bilderberg conspiracy theorists and various other cranks." He had just spent several hours weeding out some disgusting letters about a secret gay network that had supposedly infiltrated the Canadian government. "I have no wish to ever soil my hands that way again." He said he had no desire to operate his site "as a clubhouse for hard-right wackos." Conservatives often use the word "responsibility", but Andrew Coyne doesn't seem especially interested in taking responsibility for his comment situation. First, why are right-wing wackos particularly attracted to his site? Isn't that a signal that Coyne should reflect on his own views? Second, if you nuture your comments properly at the beginning, a community of readers will grow there and the comments will become mostly self-policing. Comments aren't rocket science. Clearly Coyne wasn't interested in doing that and shouldn't have comments, but it's wrong to blame the medium for that. As Paul notes, sometimes comments are the best part. But, as Maria would point out loudly, Coyne isn't even a real blogger, he's an old school journalist. Fulford isn't exploring blogging at all by spilling that much ink on him and his "problem". Fulford then spends an entire paragraph explaining that Google helps you find things. Faschinating! Then more crap about journalists who blog (see Maria, above) and a paragraph about a right-wing blog nobody has ever heard of called T.O. Crawler that doesn't even seem to exist. Near the end he does something right and slags Torontoist: But Torontoist.com hasn't developed its own point of view and devotes too much time to old-fashioned feature stories about raccoons or goings-on about town. While its series on the "Creepiest Subway Washrooms" in town showed some originality, too much of Torontoist.com feels familiar, which is death to a blog. How "feeling familiar" kills blogs is never made clear. Torontoist responded by immediately missing an opportunity to take a bite out of someone. Keep on teethin', Torontoist. BlogTO also gets a plug, but the publisher of that site is quoted saying the dumbest thing ever: "Blogging initially got a bad rap, with a lot of the early bloggers talking about feeding their cat. Now blogging is moving towards journalism - it's less like a diary, more of a theme-based approach." That is why you fail! 8:33 PM , # , \|