There’s yet another article out about weblogging, this one Living in the Blog-osphere by Steven Levy at Newsweek.
It started out with promise, though mixed with the usual condescension:
So what kind of Weblogs live in the dark matter? There are endless personal journals like Zack’s, exposing thoughts and experiences that range from the somewhat profound to the stultifyingly banal. There are collectively millions of links to obscure items tucked in dusty recesses of the Web. There are blogs devoted to cats, blogs about knitting, blogs about 802.11 wireless standards, blogs about “The Golden Girls” TV show, blogs about baseball, blogs about sex (hey, it is the Internet). One blog is written in the voice of Julius Caesar, tracking the Roman’s progress as he takes on Gaul. There are blog short stories and a blog novel in progress.
And then, rather than provide links to these “dark matter” weblogs, and interviews with writers of same, he continues with the same mundane questions asked of the same A-listers: Dave Winer, David Weinberger, Glenn Reynolds, Meg Hourihan, Rebecca Blood, Ev, and so on.
Worse, he writes example postings into his example weblog, a grotesque parady of the phenomenon.
David Weinberger, you have the ear of these people–why the hell aren’t you hitting these people upside the head and cluing them in on the ‘real’ world of weblogging? Levy makes weblogging look as exciting as reciting a shopping list. And providing safe but quotable sound bites isn’t helping anyone.
Here’s a clue for Levy and the other so-called “professional journalists”: no weblog entry is as banal as most of these mainstream “what is weblogging” articles. If we talk about what we have for lunch today, at least what we write is original.
How absolutely deadly dull.