Meta

My apologies to anyone who may have commented over the past long holiday weekend – sorry, but I’m about to delete your comment. There’s over a thousand spam comments in the moderation queue and I’m disinclined to wade through a swamp of vile uninvited porn spam- ‘rape pics now!’ and ‘viagra cialis virgin teen sisters” being a couple of the mildest. Like Sadly No says a ‘spamcano’ seems to have exploded. I would like to know whether this has happend across the wider blogosphere too or whether it’s localised to specific sectors. Hmmm.

In fact it might not be a bad idea to turn off comments entirely just now. It’s not as though commenting gets used much, is it? That’s not a complaint (Well, it is a little – why does everyone hate us? Waah!) more of an observation.

Anyway in the unlikely eventuality that you may have commented between last Saturday and Monday, that’s where it went.

Avedon Carol’s post yesterday about the general falloff in blog hits was yet another indicator of the latest periodic shakeout of Left blogdom, what with people filleting their blogrolls, burning out, dropping out, or just generally getting anxious about their hitcount or existential about the whole blogging ‘thing’. Nezua The Unapologetic Mexican has some soothing words for those afflicted by by blog angst:

A Bloggle of Wogglers

IT IS A STRANGE PHENOMENON that happens when people think of bloggers. I usually type ‘BLOGGERZ’ because that’s how “we” are so often thought of. As if one can tie a “group” or “type” of people together by the behavior that they TYPE WORDS that others can read and otherwise, do not necessarily have anything in common regarding their methodology but that they figured out some software and regularly fire it up.

Yet, it always reappears, this urge to define what function a BLOGGER has. Across the board. And I’m sure the tendency is a human one, somehow related to our need to understand environmental factors, assess behaviors and entities, group them, take inventory. As bloggers are so often human, this tendency presenteth on the Regular.

The truth is that these people need a copy of Nezua’s 2007 Blogger Stylebook, which would have cleared it up for them. As defined on page 882( Glossary), a “Blogger” is simply:

[A] person* who advertises their opinion or images on the Internet using some type of (preferably free) software while they are paid for (ostensibly) performing other activities.

*An animal may blog if they reside with a human liaison.

We all have our parts to play. Some inform, some influence, some critique, some cozy up the Establishment for A B or C, some deconstruct, some entertain, some seek to make change, or to challenge, some seek to affect the dialogue, some serve to translate the dialogue or spark new ones, some just like to talk about how drunk they got the night before (among my favorite types). And there is, of course, overlap of a varying and indeterminate amount.

Might I add take issue with and refine that definition slightly:

A] person* who advertises their opinion or images on the Internet using some type of (preferably free) software while they are paid for (ostensibly) performing other activities. skiving off from doing something productive.

Not everyone is on a salary. Other than that, exactly.

When it all starts feeling a bit pointless I try to remember the strength of the left blogosphere is collectivity and that by focusing on hierarchy and readership I miss the bigger picture. Yes, it’s annoying that the soft liberal big US blogs (who’d actually be characterised as fairly right wing in most of the rest of the world) have done exactly what one would’ve expected and promulgated a model of blogging that’s advertising revenue-driven and conforms to a stereotype of big ‘brands’ emerging as market leaders, but – never before in political history have ordinary voters been able to speak out and communicate so openly and so widely, transcending all sorts of social and national boundaries. That’s a fucking amazing thing, if you’ll excuse a gleam of optimism breaking through my usually dour demeanour.

Should I, heaven forbid, descend to the purely personal gripe, though, I’d have lots of issues with the big US bloggers. Fot a start there’s the way that political truths that the worldwide left have campaigned on for decades are now being ‘discovered’ by certain progressive blogs. They adorn the regurgitations of their very recent reading with a tag from an 18th century philosopher and post it as original thinking to be hailed as amazing new intellectual insight by the soi-disant Great Minds of the progressive intellectual blogosphere.

But if you were to politely point out that those are socialist ideas it’d be all denial and attacks of the vapours. Oooh, no, socialism? That would be dirty.My first reaction is bollocks to that, give the socialists the bloody credit. There’s also part of me wants to scream Oh for fucks sake, you took your bloody time!

Then there’s the exremely irritating way that the big Democrat bloggers contunue to enjoy the material fruits of neoliberalism even as the political system they support is biting them on the ass: they still can’t see that they are part of the system and therefore part of the problem. And then there’s the blogging kool kidz who got big and influential and then conveniently forgot who made them big in the first place.

Come the revolution….

But no, no, I couldn’t say that – that would be petty and not very in tune with my espoused collectivist ideals, wouldn’t it? Aren’t we all in it together?

So I shall take Nezua’s advice: best to take the long view and keep pegging away like all of us unnamed and uncelebrated millions do – slow and steady wins the race and so on. And when pissed off with blogs and blogging there’s always kittens or the wonder that is cephalopodia, or whatever else floats your boat. Like the man says :

So relax! And do ya thang. Others will do theirs. It will all shake out. Even on the days you don’t blog at all.

How very true.