Why I love blogs

Why I love blogs

Okay. Maybe I've just been out of touch with all of the fruits of the information age for a while. Like, maybe, twenty years. Maybe my peeves and prejudices towards the internets are archaic or at least only barely valid anymore.

When I first heard of the blogging phenomenon, I immediately equated it to the "message boards" of olde with which I had had mostly negative experiences. As I mentioned before in my posting on why I hated blogs "Why I hate blogs", I had high hopes for the information revolution back in the day for all of the good reasons for which it was launched in the first place. But as much as I tried to communicate and do research on technical matters, the internets provided little of use and instead seemed only to provide a forum for juvenile name-calling. And porn. The porn aside, these early experiences left me with a bad taste in my fingertips when it came to all things associated with media in which any and many anonymous idiots with modems could obscure a major highway with graffiti.

Maybe the maturation of internets search engines are behind the maturation of the internets themselves. If I have a technical problem or a casual interest in any given topic, one of these fine search engines can help me get to where I want to go - mostly without running into the juveniles who now seem to be left tagging the walls of their parents' basements. Unless I deliberately search for arguments over which country sucks most, I find I can walk the streets of electronic discourse quite safely.

But when I first started checking out blogs, I came across a lot of the old ugliness of the pre-internets era. Only now it seems that the topics have evolved into which political parties suck more and how certain "real" TV characters should be dealt with in situations that have already been decided. But as liberal whiners defending the plethora of filth in the rest of the media say, I can always "change the channel". The difference now is that now I can sometimes find something good.

I always enjoy running into Stu in the halls of The Company. He is always discovering interesting species under the rocks he his keen to flip over in the media stream. It is usually a good and special thing when he tells me about some of the things he has found. But the day may come when Stu and I find our professional paths diverge and I will no longer have regular occasion to enjoy his thoughts on something new under the sun. And I probably wouldn't like it if he was active enough to keep me posted on all of these things via regular e-mailings. But I can always go to his blog and find out about some cool stuff he uncovered or some new thought that came to him. This gives me some comfort. I can't argue with comfort. It is my favorite thing in the world.

And to think I owe a complete reversal and rejection of years of unnecessary fear and loathing towards such a simple and wonderful phenomenon like blogs to my association with www.banjocollege.com (that is www.banjocollege.com). It is almost as if I learned to like sour cream. Only better. Because I still hate sour cream as every human being should.

That sounds like good material for another blog. But first I have to write that one about the great Valentine’s Day dinner I had recently.

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