] 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?"

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