Enough? Or not quite . . .

So, a blog about blogging. Seems a bit silly really but here goes.

Blogs have always struck me as a kind of public diary. In them we talk about stuff we find interesting and invite people to talk back, without really reporting anything, more discussing it. They have brought the art of converstation to the profession of journalism.

However, with so many people blogging nowadays, when does so many become too many? There are so many blogs people can find regarding the specific niche they want, and when someone finds a person blogging they particularly agree with or, just generally like debating with, why would they turn to someone else, bar on a few minor occasions? Thus we find various blogs floating about somewhere in cyber space, with no one really reading them because well someone else is writing the same thing and doing it better.

Of course there's also a little known thing called "traffic". If one person interested in a particular topic tells friends about their favourite blog of course this becomes immensely popular with that group and the more people view it, the more popular it becomes in search engines. So the little guys writing about the same thing but who aren't quite as chatty don't really stand a chance do they? I realise some blogs are not going to appeal to all the people all the time, but given that the internet is so vast, surely with the sheer number of blogs being generated now some, if not most, are going to get lost somewhere in translation.

I refer you to Nicholas Carr: http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/11/blogging-rip/

He argues that with so many blogs being created, is everyone becoming just a little bit fed up of them? I agree. A good blog can be brilliantly entertaining but when you've read one about a certain topic, with so many others, it soon becomes a case of follow the leader and everyone says the same thing. Its like a popularity contest, "lets see what so-and-so is writing about this, because theirs is so popular thats all we have to do to make ours just as popular." Very soon, one blends into another and voila, the art of blogging is no longer cool, it is a chore and even more of a chore for the reader to scrawl through 100 or so thoughts on the same thing written in exactly the same way.

I'm not against blogging at all, in fact I really enjoy it. I want people to know what I think, and I want people to comment, agree and particularly to disagree. Thats the fun part. But I see where Carr is coming from. When is enough enough?

Of course perhaps the best thing to do is not make a blog all about yourself, but link to other sources and even other blogs. Linking to videos and maps and even pictures can add humour or allow people to visually understand what your talking about if description isn't perhaps your strongest point. In the world of conversational journalism that blogs promote, one may even strike up a good rapour with someone writing a blog on a similar subject and suddenly you have double the audience. Simple really.

A simple recipe for a good blog, accompanied by a cracking rap song. Understanding and humour, curtesy of youtube. See, linking . . .: