The limits of blogging

I’m a little frustrated by blogging right now.

1.) Long arguments are hard to follow and even harder to respond to.
For example: I’d love to sit down and talk about same sex marriage with Rick from Shark And Shepherd, cialis generic nurse but I’m not even going to try to respond to his three epic posts within the confines of his blog or mine.

2.) Political blogging rewards the extremes.
Extreme stances get attention. Being reasonable turns your traffic into a trickle.

3.) It’s a small blogosphere after all.
The Cheddarsphere consists of somewhere between 50 and 100 active bloggers with maybe another 500 or 600 people actively reading those blogs. My senior class in high school was bigger.

4.) It can sometimes feel very incestuous in here.
Charlie links to Rick. Rick links to Jessica. Jessica links to Dennis and Dennis links to Charlie. (And I just linked to all of them. Pretty clever, huh?)

5.) I occasionally get a definite “Emperor’s New Clothes”‘ vibe about blogging.
The Main Stream Media are fascinated by blogging. Maybe because they feel threatened. Maybe because they see an opportunity. Either way, I think they magnify the importance and impact of blogging beyond the actual reality.

Does all this mean I hate blogging or think it has no value?

Nope.

I like it quite a bit.

Just having the opportunity to publically dispute Eugene Kane and Dave Berkman is worth my monthly hosting fee.

But I have to admit, I can’t help but think there should be something more to blogging.

Right now it mostly feels like a cross between a freshman-year bull session, the last year in high school, and an internet bulletin board.

All of those are good things. But I think I was expecting blogging to be bigger than that.

9 comments March 12th, 2006