I can’t believe that nearly a month has gone by without a blog post here. Actually, I can. I have been travelling but the odd thing is that I have said, numerous times in the last four weeks, ‘I’ll have to blog about that.’ And I don’t.
   Not everything can be blamed on Blogger being less easy to use than Wordpress or my lack of time in shifting this blog on to that platform. Nor can it be blamed fully on my jet-setting. What it can be blamed on is how I view blogs as suffering from a lack of civility as a medium, the sort of thing that happened to email when the spammers got in.
   You wonder why anyone would spam these days. I have SpamKiller and I venture to say that many others have similar tools. The very popular Gmail has great spam filters, I am told. So there seems little point to engage in damaging a business’s goodwill by sending unsolicited commercial email.
   Similarly, there seems to be little point to be a dick as a commenter on blogs, but yet plenty of people are willing to do that. This year seems to have been a banner year for that, based on this blog alone, though many that choose to express their viewpoints in a less than civilized way have only their IP addresses to give up. They are anonymous, but they simply make those who disagree with them ignore them for a severe lack of credibility and, possibly, some mental condition.
   The blog fanatics out there swear by this medium because it gives them a chance to exchange viewpoints. I agree that once upon a time, blogs were pretty good for doing that, provided that sender and receiver were prepared to keep an open mind and, in case of rifts, agree to disagree. Most of the time, this blog is still pretty good as a viewpoint-exchanging tool, especially among regular readers. You guys are great, but you are also connected to me elsewhere. Therefore, some days I just can’t be bothered, especially on days when I feel I am being a slave to the technology instead of vice versa.
   Hence, November 2007 was not a great month for my blogging: I simply was having more fun living my life, notifying friends through Facebook where a mere status update replaced a fully thought-out post. It is either the dumbing down of the internet or the realization that we only have so much time in our lives.
   The other reason I see blogs as being less effective than they were mid-decade is that fewer private citizens will be out there expressing themselves as corporations move in to the ’sphere. We saw that with websites, initially something that the hobbyist hacking HTML was quite happy to do, then corporations saw a chance to commercialize the medium. I know: I commercialized it the best I could, too, when starting to build international businesses using the World Wide Web.
   I’m no longer interested in reading, for the most part, someone re-reporting the MSM. Why don’t I just read the original report? True, many times I wouldn’t even have known of the original article if it were not for the blogger. But I prefer my own analysis and I have no desire to be one of those commenting assholes debating for the sake of it, just because someone else recorded her or his opinion in the blogosphere before I did. Unless it’s something that strikes a nerve, I don’t really want to blog about it myself.
   Perhaps it is just an annual thing. Twelve months ago, I expressed similar dissatisfaction but still managed to get through a few months in 2007 where I was blogging 30-plus times per month. That’s still over a post a day. Maybe summer means I am outside, enjoying life, and being selfish about that enjoyment by not sharing it.
   Who knows? I might be a hypocrite and get back to my earlier output by February 2008. For now, I am feeling blasé about blogging, as I have done most of this month. It might pass—unless it doesn’t. Posted by Jack Yan, 04:35  permalink

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