Uhm, He Hates Weblogs…

I gave up after the first sentence. If he was eleoquent enough, he’d have managed to get the point across without having to resort to that amount of profanity.

I think he’s using inarticulacy as a rhetorical device for comic effect.

Actually you could be right – I went and had another look and beyond the first blurb, things did change.
Do you think he’s saying that webloggers can’t spell (he’d be right, looking at my spelling of ‘eloquent’ above), and that we can’t construct grammatically correct sentences. Oh wait! I have trouble with that too. *VBEG*

Parts 1~3 are complaining about the existence of Sturgeon’s Law: as Weblog tools get easier to use, the 90 percent of us who write crap are represented more and more. Complaining about that is about as useful as complaining about gravity.
Part 4 is mistaking a feature for a bug: Weblogs make communication more inefficient, which is the only long-term method of reducing spam.
Part 5 I agree with — the only point in calling Weblogs “blogs” is to make them more obscure.
Parts 6 and 7 are just masturbation on the author’s part. Without passing laws, you can’t decide what people will and won’t do on the Web.

(Okay, who was the bright spark who decided not to support HTML entities in the comments? ?? )

He’s a troll. What’s worse, he got to be a troll here and he didn’t even have to post here. I guess that makes him a less unintelligent troll.

mpt, that would be me. I’ll put in some code now that should make entities work.

Umm…. no. Thats all I have to say.

It seems to me his main complaint is that WebLogs often lack any real sense of purpose beyond an individuals personal opinions on whatever topic they are choosing to fill your screen with today. A complaint I can certainly empathise with. It’s not really unfair to say that WebLogs suck if the content sucks, they aren’t going to make content any better. He just happens to be saying that the content tends to suck alot. Which honestly, it really does. Parts 6-7 may indeed be masturbatory, but that’s what weblogs are all about isn’t it? Personally I think he raises some very good points, I don’t care what your cat’s favourite cheese is.
Criticising an essay based on it’s use of profanities and bad style really isn’t that acceptable in my eyes. Some of the greatest philosophers ever to take up the task of commiting their thoughts to paper have been truly awful writers. Take John Stuart Mill for instance, his essay On Liberty has some truly dire passages, many sentenaces of his are actually entirely redundant in fact, bringing no added clarity or meaning to his point. Yet he is considered one of the most important political philosophers of all time. As long as the ideas are there, and it is possible to understand them, then it’s acceptable. It’s just not very good.

Yes, a lot of weblogs suck and are boring. This is because a lot of people suck and are boring. I don’t argue with their right to exist and I’m not going to argue with the right of their weblogs to exist either, because a) I have access to a little grey box marked ‘x’ in the corner of my screen with which to combat the sucky boringness and b) apart from anything else (freedom of speech, self-expression, do what thou wilt and harm none etc. etc.) repeating truisms like ‘most weblogs suck and are boring’ is very boring.

no one forces to visit a blog. free (sucking) websites have existed since ages. people did not update their FREE websites coz it was paiful to do them… download pages, change content, upload them… blogs just help them to make more uptodate pages. so its much better. atleast u dont see many dead blogs. though i still have personal webpages hosted on 3-4 free webhosts somewhere on this web :S
someone clean that trash…

I don’t think he ever actually made the blanket statement that weblogs suck. It was _personal_ weblogs that he had issue with. Specifically ones that have become known as “cheese sandwich” blogs. The kind that read like this: “Got up today. I got dresses. Ate a cheese sandwich. It was yummie.” — Who gives a #@$^? I agree, those kind of blogs tend to be boring.
BUT….
If it touches a specific subject — which many do I think — then it’s a different story. To be truly effective, it needs to have an audience of somekind. Which means creating a focus that is going to draw people to your blog.
TG

weren’t journals originally meant to be private diaries! ??
I think I lost the point somewhere… :S

@ alox
I actually wasn’t criticizing his use of profanity, merely stating that I wouldn’t read it at first because of that. It is my personal opinion that that kind of language is unnecessary in getting your point across and being taken seriously – he came across, in that first paragraph, as being exactly what NM said. My second comment was made in jest, in regards to ntt’s comment about the inarticulacy being deliberate.
We are all entitled to our personal opinions. We all have a right to express those opinions, whether other people think they suck or not. As Shushubh said, a diary/weblog is a personal thing. We all do it for our own reasons. Isn’t it as wrong to criticize that as it is to criticize the use of profanity?

[I hate Internet Explorer, it crashed and took the original version of this post with it. Time to try again.]
Firstly you have no basis for your opinion about the use of profanity. They are just words, they are not ideas, they can’t hurt anyone. Idea’s can. It is an opinion held only because of the emotive asscociations of such words, the word “fuck” for instance has become so far detatched from it’s original meaning that any relationship between the two is passing at best. It is now little more than a sound which adds emphasis to a statement.
We are indeed entitled to our personal opinions, this does not mean they shouldnt be criticised merely because they are “personal.” I would imagine the author of the essay would not be so irate about personal weblogs if they where kept private, they are largely not. The author does say in the preface that it is written largely “tounge in cheek,” that is to say, he doesn’t really want to burn all personal weblogers at the stake, that they shouldn’t be allowed to publically express their opinion of cheese sandwhiches. Merely that they should refrain from writing garbage for all the world to see. Keep it private, or risk it being criticised. The personal weblogers have not kept their weblogs private and hence they have been criticised. It is not in the least wrong to criticise personal opinion. Prepending the word “personal” does not change anything. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t put yourself at risk.
The point of the essay is that personal weblogs are mostly not worth reading. I believe that those reading this thread already agree with that noting by the refferences to Sturgeons Law and so on. This topic is not worth discussing more, and if it is, it is not worth discussing here.