In my continued effort to work through/cull my Bloglines subscriptions, I have noticed a strange and saddening trend of people seemingly suggesting that we should just shut up. (That is, stop blogging.)
I saw it in this post at What not to do in Asia…, as well as in this final post at ξενιτεια. (Boy I hope the Greek shows up correctly.)
I can understand the sinking whumph of deciding to give upfor however longon blogging. I can see the motivation in mocking Friday Cat BloggeryI mean, I don’t give a damn about other peoples’ cats, of course, except my friend John’s whom I only think of when it’s slinking toward me.
But I don’t think that it’s necessary to declare the death of blogging in general, the irrelevance of this strange new world we’re all creating out there in the blogosphere. I’m sure I’ll have my fill of it, too, sooner or later. I find already it eats up too much of my time.
But that doesn’t mean we should look down on it. More and more, the political bloggery seems to me less interestingthough more necessaryand the niche bloggery seems more necessary.
The niche stuff is interesting because you get mini-experts, or even pseudo-experts. The political stuff, though, involves too little interchange between different parts of the spectrum to be considered an example of political discussion (see this for more).
The personal stuff… ah, the personal stuff. Sometimes I think I post too much of the personal stuff, but you know, outside of the best few niche blogs in each subject, I find myself returning time and time again to blogs where interesting personal stuff gets posted.
Okay, and also where people do creative stuff, like this Diner Radio show by James Lileks (which I am listening to right now). If you ask me, the future of mediablogging is in the direction of this, man.
But hey, for those of us who are just textual geeks, for now, I’ll settle for a shortened list of subscriptions at bloglines, and amuse myself in other ways.
For now.