Blogging for Nerds is a thoughtful article about why blogging should be interesting to hardcore techies, not just the vast number of regular folks who use blogs to comment on the trials and tribulations of their pets. Yes, the signal to noise ratio of blogs is astoundingly low, but given how good computers are at filtering large amounts of information, having a vast pool of information to swim through is a good thing.
Even if a lot of the blog updates out there contain a bunch of info most people would consider useless, once you take a step back from the individual post and start taking a look at the whole you can start seeing patterns. All the junk thrown into blogs starts to look exactly like the pulse of the collective unconscious if you stand back far enough and squint just the right way.
So no, I probably don’t care what someone’s cat had for breakfast, but due to the ease of publishing information in a blog, anyone who does care about feline morning dietary habits has a good chance of finding that information online. It’s a simple matter of weeding out the stuff you don’t care about.
In the blogging community, we now have the proverbial million monkeys at typewriters. And although they haven’t produced the complete works of Shakespeare yet, they have produced something much more valuable: a glimpse at the collective soul of humanity. People blog about things that they care about, intensely personal things that may only matter to a few other people in the entire world. I think some people probably share a little too much online, but it’s still great to see so many people who are passionate about such a diversity of topics.
And in case anyone’s interested, my cats had turkey en molé, stolen from the kitchen counter, for breakfast this morning.
