[10/30/2001 12:34:27 AM | Mike Crowl]
Since I last wrote in here, some months ago, it appears that the Blog business has boomed even further - business in the loosest sense of the word. Blog is everywhere, and yet it's nowhere. It's acknowledged by people who blog, and yet it's an unacknowledged aspect of the Net. Only bloggers seem to know about blogs. And I'm still curious as to who reads all the stuff. It's like those private diaries that thousands of people in the last couple of centuries wrote, and which were never seen in their lifetimes...perhaps their grandchildren discovered them, and wondered at the nonsense their forebears scribbled. Perhaps they were never discovered. Thousands of words lost, only known by God. And now with Blogs, there are millions of words created every day, and what millions read them? I know no one personally who does. I've never been in email contact with anyone who does. I've seen nothing about it in the news, and yet there are any number of news articles on the topic available - when you go to a site that is enthusiastic about blogging. Yes, there are a few newspapers that have online blogs, and some people in the world must read these - yet when I looked at the Guardian Unlimited blog it was overwhelmed by the amount of material. And that brings me back to the way I felt about blogs last time - the way they clog up the Net, interlinking like entangled spider webs. In the end who needs all this news? Who can cope with it all?

Furthermore, it brings on even more of that sense of ennui that I read about in some article last night. The way in which we tend to stick to the same few links that we know. How many of us have a heap of favourites on our web browser. How many in fact do we revisit after our initial excitement? Few enough, if the truth be told. I could count them on one hand, possibly one and a bit. And this is a concern to those who expect to make money out of the Web. Already advertising is a bore on the Web, be it banner ads or those annoying things that pop up and won't go away. (I hate the way Geocities has a small ad in the corner, effectively blocking off some of my web page.) People don't read newspapers for ads, they read them for the news - otherwise, surely, they'd be called adpapers (some are!). People don't go on the Net for the ads - they go for the particular thing they're checking out. The ads are an irritating mote in the eye of most web surfers, I suspect, only noticed when they somehow coincide with the interest of the surfer - and it doesn't seem to me that's very often.
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