Blogging Burnout

It started with a simple question -- what do all good things have in common? The answer led me to the person who invented blogging. I shook his hand. Made him comfortable in a chair opposite my workstation. Then, banged his head on the glaring monitor. Stretched his eyebrows to his forehead so he could read the text in front of him clearly. And whispered in his ears, "Look what you have created, Frankenstein!"

Am I a psychotic junkie? Anti-institution? Mentally disturbed?

No.

I am an ordinary netizen suffering from repeated overdoses of junk blogs.

Bloggers on board

A few years ago I began my day with a daily dose of news that mattered. Then someone said the guy behind the noise-emitting-module had started 'blogging' its development. Cool! Then one day, the guy talks of another guy who tried using the module but couldn't produce any noise, so he patched it up. Cool! Another interesting guy. But this one had a day-job and a family. He not only blogged about his experience making sure the module produced adequate noise, but also the 1000-year old fossil he found in his backyard, his son's first steps, his daughter's recital. And look he has pictures too.

So this friendly neighborhood blogger is very popular as he is on the noise-emitting-module guys 'list of blogs to read'. He inspires Gulliver from Liliput to blog. Mr. Gulliver opens his heart out, crying over his inability to find a sizable mate, wondering why all his friends are midgets, his eating habits, and yes his occasional troubles with his over-sized paper-weight and punching machine.

Meanwhile, since the original guy's project has become very popular, there are many folks working on it and blogging about it as well to let everyone know what's up. He decides to get everyone under one roof, that gets its name from an astronomical body. Soon a corporation joins the project and hires a few guys to work on it. Part of that same astronomical group, these guys unable to understand their function, blog their daily list of development/compilation tasks. Wow. Transparency. Very rapidly the number of such heavenly bodies multiply.

And, wow, everyone gets lots of reads and comments. Online Poker and Texas Holdem seem to be very dedicated readers, giving their valuable feedback to each and every blogger, over and over again.

So, wow, since this blogging stuff lets you read each others mind, the corporation decides to ask its every non-technical employee to blog as well. The stylish employees who make all the money for the corporation, see this as an opportunity and talk at length about their lovely company and their down-to-earth CEO -- the guy with the yatch.

Then comes the new century and election day. Suddenly no one's listening to the news anchors. Blogs steal the show. This throws the human civilization into a debate -- can bloggers substitute guys in suits and a microphone?

No one has stopped the bloggers from doing anything? Why question now? There's a new ruler and he hates people who ask questions. So shut the hell up. Everyone concurs.

Over time everything pans out. Blogs bring to kids what their Biology classes couldn't, exclusive images from certain desert confrontations, a few terrorist rituals and much more.

Blogs are a success. The information age has found a new vehicle.

So, what's wrong?

The numbers. They are wrong.

Blogs were supposed to get information. But all they now get are colored, underlined lines of text. A computer assembler strikes a deal with another component vendor. There's a press release and a few news reports. A few thousand new age blog journalists link to the same report. Those with gray hair, without the senior editor scrutinizing their report, made outlandish claims of this announcement and brand it exclusive. Another thousand link to this.

Unfortunately I spend the first few hours of my day reading some of these thousands of blogs. I scroll through their personal life troll to get to that hidden jewel of information. But all I now get is "...and oh here's a nice report...", or "...do take time of to read this report...", or "...if you are into computers this report...", or "...what! you haven't read this report..." and another thousand permutations.

And then someone asks me: so why don't you blog?

The answer to this brings me back to the question I began with: what do all good things have in common? Burnout. And its smelly aftermath.

-- Freedom of speech and all that.

http://geekybodhi.net/articles/blogging_burnout.htm