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Indulging A Nihilist Impulse

Bloggers get applauded or dissed by the punditry depending on what value they perceive the community brings to online social, political and cultural commentary. This article in eurozine presents some very interesting views on the subject of what blogging and bloggers are good for and not. One excerpt feels particularly germane to most if not all of my posts :

Blog entries are often hastily written personal musings, sculptured around a link or event. In most cases, bloggers simply do not have the time, skills, or financial means for proper research. There are collective research blogs working on specific topics, but these are rare. What ordinary blogs create is a dense cloud of "impressions" around a topic. Blogs will tell you if your audience is still awake and receptive. Blogs test. They allow you to see whether your audience is still awake and receptive. In that sense we could also say that blogs are the outsourced, privatized test beds, or rather unit tests[9] of the big media.

Like mine, a lot of blogs don't progress from being a test bed for thoughts and ideas to something more functional. They are somewhat like pet IT projects in big companies that are officially canned but continue to be invested in a little at a time by those who had once invested time and energy in it and continue to have a passion for what it stands for. Every once in a while, the powers that be will threaten to really kill it only to discover that a small population has use for it and would really hate to see it go.

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