I spent a lot of time on Usenet in the 90s, which really hones your ability to argue well if you're capable of learning. Dani Zweig was the guy whose spanking first taught me that I needed to learn how to argue and fast.
Usenet is not blogging. The standard analogy (at least in Usenet's Golden Age) was Usenet as cocktail party: many different people holding many different conversations on many different topics, with the added feature that you could drift from conversation to conversation without missing anything.
Usenet, of course, collapsed under the weight of spam and newbies to its near unreadability today, but I still value that kind of forum highly. You could find focused, reasoned discussion with intelligent people on any topic you chose.
That isn't blogging. The blogs I like to read (and what I aspire to) aren't discussion. They're much more akin to newspaper columns: Personal, thoughtful, thought-provoking, but ultimately one-way, a writer speaking to an audience. A blog of this sort is owned by one or a few individuals. Even given comment pages and linkbacks, the readers are qualitatively different from the blog owner.
I will note as an aside that comment pages and linkbacks are intrinsically affected by the nature of the medium. In a newsreader, the time to jump from one post to the next in a series is a couple tenths of a seoond, at most: one keystroke and a screen repaint. In a web browser, the time to jump from a blog entry to its comments page is a factor of ten longer even on a high-speed connection, as you move to click on the link and the comments page loads across the Internet, possibly even opening a new window. It loses immediacy. That loss of immediacy is a profound distancing mechanism between blogger and responder. There is no such distance between post and followup on Usenet.
That's not better or worse than the Usenet model or the closely-akin Slashdot form of blogging. It's different. As my buddy Immigration Lass put it, ownership of a blog is a feature, not a bug.
So my approach to a blog necessarily presumes exactly that sort of approach: The blog as column. It will present my thoughts on whatever topic happens to cross my whimsical little brain.
I'm not a link distributor. For the most part, I'm going to assume that you all read the same sources I do or can use Google as well as I can. I'm not going to tell you to go read a Salon article; I'm going to tell you what I think about the ideas, situations, and controversies covered in the Salon article.
I'm not an interblogger. I'm not going to link to Hortense's blog entry about my blog entry about Alphonse's blog entry about my blog entry about Grand Banks fishery depletion. Because, frankly, I don't care. If Alphonse and Hortense have interesting and substantial things to say, their blog entries aren't going to be about my blog entry; they're going to be about the interesting and substantial things they have to say about Grand Banks fishery depletion.
So that's what my blog isn't.
What it is, is what I am: Opinionated, egotistical, idiosyncratic, and, ideally, well-informed and thoughtful.
As for the name, Frothing-at-the-Mouth Lad is the alias I use as self-mockery of my tendency to rant. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
Posted by Greg at August 20, 2002 4:58 PM