obso1337.org

Blogging has become more and more popular as wireless access has become more available, more people have an interest of being on the web and CMSs have become easier to use and very powerful. A recent (well maybe not so recent) entry on codepoetry isnt so happy with the state of the internet and the plethora of weblogs scattered about. In their opinion Weblogs Killed the Personal Website. Personally, I think this is bullshit.

Blogging killed the personal website, eh? OK, to be fair, lets define his idea of a “personal website”.

Generally, it was an index page listing what you wanted to share and then various other real, honest-to-goodness hand-crafted pages below that about various topics. Some were essays, some were links to pictures or pages of pictures, sometimes something like a weblog but markedly different (”Updated on Wed: Yes, we can do this now!” then later “Updated on Fri: Oh, well, except for ___”). It was a site and it had pages and those pages were distinct, separate, and unchanging. Some had a webpage while others had a whole website (back when the difference was that a site was more than one page, not a domain name versus your ISP’s /~name/ hosting plan).

Alright, I will agree with that. But where do the blogs come in?

Now we have websites, via the old definition, that are nothing more than a large array of pages of rants and raves and quizzes and “OMG! U R KIdding!!!!!!” and polls and … and … crap and it’s covered all over in Amazon links in the hope of some random reader buying something, completely ignoring that that person got there via a Google query consisting of some band’s name and one of nude, naked, or erotic. The average weblog is a disaster of bad English, bad design, bad taste, and bad software.

Hmm. So how is this any different than websites again? Before weblogs there were sites which were a disaster of bad English, bad design, bad taste, and bad software. Remember the mid 90’s? God, those webpages were awful. Written by a bunch of script kiddies or people whose first language was not english (bad english), using Front Page to build the site (bad design, bad software) putting who-knows-what on their page, from porn to personal information that no one really cared about (bad taste). Maybe he was talking about the advent of broadband and high-bandwidth sites? Sure, some of them were pretty, but others wernt so hot and crowded your browser with just as much bad design and lack of content.

The journal format solved the problem of updates being little bold tags at the bottom of a page, but at the expense of it feeling like a “real” personal website. Now, it’s not like it killed it directly; there’s nothing about Blogger that said “this is your only site!” and prevented it from being used as a journal section of a standard site. Even today, with that tool and others, this is possible and some people have done it and made “old fashioned” websites with weblog-centric CMS packages. The problem lies in that if one has a tool for a task, one will prefer the tool to anything that requires manual labor.

Ah, but some people dont really need anything more than a journal. Think about the blogging community, the software and the audience. Many people do not have the need or desire to have a ten page website complete with update pages, photo galleries, links, stories and whatever else you think they need in order to have a webpage. These tools allow a non-technical user to have and maintain their own webpage. “Manual labor” isnt necessary because they dont have the skills to perform to begin with. Perhaps his argument this entire time is that the internet is full of non-technical-users who are eating up his near-infinite supply of bandwidth and hosting space. There are more users today with a place in cyberspace than there were five years ago. These are all attributed to the same things the author of this article blames the plethora of weblogs (wireless and CMS).

Take my mom for example. This is a woman whose basic internet needs are email and webbrowsing. She owns and shows miniature horses, and often browses the internet for information about shows, horses for sale or otherwise related information. Sometimes she will come across vanity webpages of people she knows with pictures of their horses. Recently she thought it would be fun if she could have a website of her own. I thought this was a great idea. So I set her up with WordPress, Gallery and a domain name from goDaddy.com. After a few hours of tweaking and tutorials she was able to post pictures online and write journal entries about her horses and shows. What more can she want? The better question is: What more can she need? She represents a significant chunk of the webpage users out there who just want a presence on the internet to show their friends.

But the key point here is that there are more users which are represented on the internet. I think thats great. The bad design has always been there and it will always be there. As for the bad English, my only comment is you speak like your audience. If your page is full of OMG WTF, most likely your audience will be saying the same thing. LiveJournal was one of the first domains to begin this revolution of blogging and many have and will follow. It may be a fad but just like outerspace, the junk will be floating around for years to come.