crankymessiah wrote:
] ] It's not that I'm bitter. Oh alright then, I am. When I
] ] was doing a weekly round-up of interesting web links in
] ] 1996 (still the top search result for the phrase "GLR
] ] jokes", if you'd like to check), I found myself using
] ] something very similar to what experts now call the
] ] weblog format. And was I hailed as the pioneer of a brave
] ] new form of distributed grassroots journalism? No, I was
] ] not.
] ]
] ] I was regarded - quite rightly, as it turned out - as
] ] some sort of nut who re-used the same HTML to update his
] ] home page every now and again. Don't get me wrong: I'm a
] ] huge fan of fanzines, home pages, and the whole
] ] do-it-yourself attitude. But because publishing one of
] ] these usually requires some element of effort, sometimes
] ] that's reflected in their contents.
] ]
] ] On the other hand, it's getting so easy to update a
] ] weblog that some users seem to type in their thoughts
] ] willy-nilly, posting unimaginable banalities, like a
] ] nation of Alan Partridges trying to fill an internet's
] ] worth of dead air: CDs they're listening to,
] ] scintillating accounts of their day at work, URLs of
] ] sites they feel they should acknowledge, despite having
] ] nothing new to say about them. It is like one of those
] ] terrible Christmas family newsletters for every single
] ] day of the year.
]
] I love the conclusion of this article. It's so true:
] "People used to worry about the government compiling a
] database of everything they knew about you and everything you
] did. But who'd have thought we'd be so keen to keep updating
] our own entries?"

which is _precisely_ why I've never had a home page.

RE: Guardian Unlimited | Online | A blogger is a stalker's dream