A roundup by Sarah Boxer.
With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It's not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It's that the whole culture of linking — composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references — doesn't sit happily in a book. Yes, I'm talking about bloggy writing itself.
Is there really such a thing? A growing stack of books has pondered the effects of blogs and bloggers on culture (We've Got Blog and Against the Machine), on democracy (Republic.com 2.0), on politics (Blogwars), on privacy (The Future of Reputation), on media (Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation and We're All Journalists Now), on professionalism (The Cult of the Amateur), on business (Naked Conversations), and on all of the above (Blog!). But what about the effect of blogs on language?
Are they a new literary genre? Do they have their own conceits, forms, and rules? Do they have an essence?
