blog blog blogIt's an addictive thing, blogging. It seems to be that you either set up a blog, make a few posts, and then forget about the whole thing, or set up a blog, make a few posts, make a few more, then, before you know it, you're sitting there watching a bad advertisment for toothpaste making mental notes about it for a blog post you're going to make later on (or, more than likely, right away).

Some people, and although it's easy to say, they're probably nearly all Americans, have taken blogging to extremes. This NY Times article tells the story of several blogging addicts...

Jocelyn Wang, a 27-year-old marketing manager in Los Angeles, started her blog, a chronicle of whatever happens to pop into her head, 18 months ago as an outlet for boredom.

Now she spends at least four hours a day posting to her blog and reading other blogs. Ms. Wang's online journal is now her life. And the people she has met through the blog are a large part of her core of friends.

"There is no real separation in my life," she said. Like Mr. Wiggins, Ms. Wang blogs while on vacation. She stays on floors at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco with access to a free Internet connection. ("So I can blog," she explains.)

Four hours? Crikey - makes my half hour morning blog-scan and update seem pitiful.

Some analysts have commented on the blog as being a new form of media, and specifically a sub-genre of journalism, in that...

...while most webloggers aren't journalists, we're at the beginning of a greatly expanded media ecosystem in which gifted amateurs, niche experts and eyewitnesses giving first-hand accounts are all engaging in a form of journalism.

Goody, after being refused entry to Canterbury's Journalism School in favour of my better-looking writing partner of the time, I'm now able to access the hallowed realms of journo-land by merely recording my aimless day-to-day thoughts here. Or maybe not. George Packer argues against the information quality (although not against the medium as a journalistic genre per se) that bloggers pass on via their posts...

...if blogs are "a new way of doing politics," there is also something peculiarly stale and tired about them — not the form, but the content.

So far this year, bloggers have been remarkably unadept at predicting events (as have reporters, who occupy a different part of the same habitat). Most of them failed to foresee Dean's rise, Dean's fall, Kerry's resurgence, Bush's slippage. Above all, they didn't grasp the intensity of feeling among Democratic primary voters — the resentments still glowing hot from Florida 2000, the overwhelming interest in economic and domestic issues, the personal antipathy toward Bush, the resurgence of activism, the longing for a win. The blogosphere was often caught surprised by these passions and the electoral turns they caused. Rather than imitating or reproducing external reality, it exists alongside, detached, self-encased, in a stance of ironic or combative appraisal.

Even when bloggers get off their arses and head out to 'report' real events via their blogs, there's something missing...

When one of the best of the bloggers, Joshua Micah Marshall, brought his laptop to New Hampshire and tried to cover the race in the more traditional manner, the results were less than satisfying; his posts failed to convey the atmosphere of those remarkable days between Iowa and the first primary.

The blog-geek was probably freaked out at being in a room full of people and lost his muse.

Not really related to any of the above is the rise of the mp3 blog. When I was starting out in the online world in the mid 90s, and mp3 started to raise its ugly head, there was a flood of illegal and semi-legal mp3 trading sites. I submitted my band's mp3s to every one I could find, just to get the music out there. I used to keep a folder of the sites that we were on, but they got closed down, moved, and shared their contents with others to the point that I just gave up, and concentrated on some of the bigger sites that were moving into the mp3 realm (also now mostly defunct: eg. mp3.com, amp3.com, garageband (been and gone and been again), mp3.com.au and the like). It may be that the illegal mp3 site has rolled along at about the same rate as normal, but a new variation on that sort of site has been spawned via blogs: mp3 blogging.

MP3 blogs usually operate under a 'fair use' arrangement. They make mp3s available for a short amount of time, usually with a wee review or recommendation (definitely not a hallmark of the older illegal sites, which tended to just be eat-all-you-can directories), tend to cover a theme or genre, and will more often than not contain a link to a store where you can buy the CD or 'retail' mp3. Now that's fair use. They're great. For a good starting point, try here (link courtesy of dubber at the wireless). My favourite of the moment is Fluxblog (probably because of the tagline: Fluxblog is so hot right now).
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