I Hate Blogs

I was looking for, but couldn't find, a quote I came across that captured my ire that bloggers would rather pontificate without the interruptions that normally come as part of the give-and-take of conversation. I'll add it later if I ever come across it again! In any case, I just saw a blog that stated "all blogs are monologues" with no irony whatever. Is this supposed to be a good thing?

Why do I care? Because not so long ago, after the web but before blogging, people used to actually chat. They would have conversations that evolved over time, with people interacting and reacting to eachother. By contrast, blogs are like vacuums, voids, where the static word rests on its podium, never to be mutated by the outside world.

I discovered the joy of online chat in 2001. My search for a long-discontinued fragrance (my college fragrance, Oleg Cassini for Woman, distributed by Jovan) led me to Javaslublu, a now-defunct perfume bottle collecting site and perfume directory, and then to the Long Lost Perfumes chat site on Yahoo. To my delight I found dozens of women like me who felt betrayed by an industry that hooked us on a product only to discontinue it, or worse still, change it. We were all equals in our ability to share information and experiences on the chat site, although occassionally the moderator would censor a topic that got too contentious.

You always knew that this wasn't exactly the free association our founding fathers had in mind. The chat site had been organized by a perfume company, Long Lost Perfumes, that mined our conversations for intellegence about perfume re-releases that might be profitable, and directly marketed its products to the extent it could. Then there was the censorship that eventually discouraged discussion of anything but perfume. But these were conversations that evolved and followed detours wherever they went.

Eventually the intrusion by the moderator was intollerable to many, and we formed an independent chat site free from comercial influence: Perfume Addicts, on DelphiForums. It had a good run, and attracted participation from a handful of experts in perfume (Michael Edwards, Luca Turin, Chandler Burr). Ours was not the only independent perfume chat site, but I would claim it was one of the most independent. It didn't accept funding from perfume advertisers (as Basenotes does).

Then, about four years ago, people who previously had been content to participate and converse as members decided they wanted a forum for their own voice, potentially a voice that would find commercial sponsors. "Hey! Why not make money from that hobby of yours honey? Building that perfume collection on eBay has been sucking up income for a decade. Why not make some of it back?" Soon there were almost as many perfume blogs as readers! And as soon as someone became a blogger, they stopped writing posts on chat sites. Why use their time and ideas in someone else's forum when they were gems you could post in your own blog? Words were the commodity you were "selling", and they were too prescious to give away for free.

This killed the online chat forum. Too many of the people who were knowlegable or passionate about perfume sought their own forum through a blog, and the remaining group of chatters shrank and ran out of things to say and people to say them to. What had been a conversation became splintered into dozens or even hundreds of blogs.

Blogs robbed us of conversation! I hate blogs.