Made You Look - the "woah" edition

1) MC Hammer has a blog! (It's kinda cute actually.)

2) #9 on list "Existence of the following astounds me" is kickin!

3) Leah can't take the heat. oh wow. what a surprise.

Go ahead, technorati leah, google "leah mclaren" + "repressed homosexuals" as well as "ryan bigge" and you'll understand the lead up to this "withering, critical attack." (Bigge)

I couldn't help myself and opened the floodgate. Read my 2 cents here. (scroll to the bottom)

Logging out of the blogosphere

Leah McLaren
The Globe and Mail, February 25, 2006

On an average morning, I get up, make coffee, sit down at my computer
and check my e-mail before rushing out into the blogosphere -- a place
I have recently decided to vacate for good.

First, I would visit the celebrity sites -- a sordid collection of
gossip and venom peddlers, entertaining enough to get the columnist's
bile flowing. Gawker.com is a New York-based site that specializes in
celebrity takedowns disguised as sightings ("Lindsay Lohan was there
with a pretty large posse. Only two bathroom trips and she seemed to
be holding it together alright. She's still way skinny, BTW"). Then
there's Gofugyourself.com, a website devoted to cataloguing and
revelling in the truly astonishing and seemingly endless litany of
celebrity fashion mishaps.

After that, I might check out some American and Canadian
political/media blogs (Wonkette, Daily Kos, Paul Wells, Andrew Coyne)
before moving on to more "established" information sources.

The day I decided to swear off the blogosphere was the morning I
decided to plug my own name -- and the names of several other writers
I know and admire -- into the search engine at technorati.com, a site
known as Blogger HQ (it claims to itemize every new blog on the
Internet; last time I checked, the head count was more than 28
million). The results of my search were grim: countless chat rooms
full of bitter unpublished writers venomously slagging published ones
-- their terrible spelling, poorly constructed sentences and
outrageous amounts of displaced hatred and envy a testimony to why
they became bloggers in the first place.

Despite early optimistic reports that the Internet and all its
unregulated glory was going to supplant the mainstream media, in
reality the opposite has happened. When a blog is readable, the
blogger tends to be either one of two things: a professional
commentator who is providing a venue for public debate among his or
her own readers (as with Coyne and Wells), or a talented up-and-comer.
In the case of the latter, the blogger is inevitably lured into the
establishment with a book deal or position at an above-board
publication (as with the last two editors of Wonkette, who both
received six-figure book deals for outing Washingtonienne blogger
Jessica Cutler, who in turn received her own six-figure book deal and
an invitation to pose for Playboy).

So the underground media revolution is officially over. Further proof:
The February issue of Vanity Fair ran a photo featuring the Internet's
top commentators, including the typists behind Gawker, Defamer and
Wonkette. "The irony was sweet," Trevor Butterworth wrote last week in
the Financial Times. "Gawker was supposed to make fun of this kind of
inside-the-establishment posing. But the victory was sweeter: It was a
signal moment, a benediction from a magazine that, more than any
other, has become the plush chronicler of the celebrity
establishment."

My own problem with the blogosphere is not that it's selling out to
the mainstream, but that most of it is spectacularly boring. The
dominant quality is tedium: writers without editors, fact-checkers or
paying subscribers to keep them in check. As Butterworth succinctly
puts it: "If the pornography of opinion doesn't leave you longing for
an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the
relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its
seriousness as a medium."

Why then, other than hearing the sound of his own voice unfettered by
editorial nips and tucks, does the blogger blog? One tempting
explanation is that what a blogger has to say is unfit for
publication. This is usually true. Much like teachers who teach
because they can't do, the blogger blogs because he can't publish.

But this doesn't hold up in all cases. Take my friend and peer David
Eddie. A Toronto-based novelist, journalist and screenwriter, Eddie
maintains a blog at http://www.davideddie.com even though he
invariably has several other professional writing projects on the go.
When I ask him (slightly incredulously) why on Earth he would bother
to write down his opinions for free, he shrugs.

"It's a good way to limber up. You get up in the morning, fire up a
blog, write the thing in 15 minutes and then you know what's on your
mind. I think it was Nabokov who said, 'How do I know what's on my
mind until I write it down?' "

Eddie's blog is whimsical and soul-searching, devoid of all the
self-serving spitefulness of many other whiners in the sphere. I find
myself checking it just to see what he's thinking. The beauty of the
blog, as he points out, is that it's informal and free-flowing, as
opposed to formal journalism, which can be stilted. For established
writers then, the attraction is creativity.

That's fine for some, but it isn't enough of a reason for me to go
on-line -- where the growing, unedited noise in the margins is too
loud to ignore -- when I can enjoy my favourite writers in more
established venues. If I'm supposed to feel part of some cool, fringe
community, or world-changing global discussion, I'm not getting it.

As Choire Sicha, formerly of Gawker and now a senior editor at the New
York Observer, told the Financial Times, the democratic promise of
blogs has produced more fragmentation at a time when seeing the bigger
picture is much more important.

"The word blogosphere has no meaning," he said. "There is no sphere;
these people aren't connected; they don't have anything to do with
each other. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of
op-eds and letters and wire-service feeds."

Which is exactly why I'm swearing off the blogosphere for good --
except, of course, for the celebs in bad outfits.

lmclaren@globeandmail.com