I like to spend a while each day cruising random weblogs off weblogs.com or wherever. I have to say that there’s a lot of crap out there, and just as much good stuff. There’s lots of stuff that’s infuriating for a variety of reasons, and there’s lots of stuff that makes me stop and be like, damn, people are awesome.

Anyway, on that note, and also thinking about how my website comes up for a lot of weird searches because of my blog, I offer the following article by the Register.

Basically, it’s about how there’s a group of whiny bitches out there who complain endlessly about how blogs are “polluting” Google results with “trackbacks, mindless links and other noise”. This is the biggest bunch of damn crap in the world. Second only to this quote:

“Bloggers are a tiny minority of the population, but they’ve created an echo chamber that gives inappropriate weight to their choices. They’re proud of this, and they brag about their capacity to game Google with Googlebombs and other search-skewing play. Some intentionally, some not, they’ve subverted a search engine people liked because it was meritocratic about information, and made it about themselves and their narcissism. “

The first line of that really sets my righteous indignation-o-meter all the way up to 11, and steam starts shooting out my ears. The reason why? Well, “…a tiny minority of the population … that gives inappropriate weight to their choices”? Does that sound like anybody you know? Huge media companies? Un-elected American governments? For christ’s sake! What do these people want? Would they prefer to just be served a continuous diet of fast-food news from AOL and MSN and people whom the established giants authorize to speak on their behalf?

This drives me crazy.

Blogs are changing the face of the internet, and thereby of human knowledge. Deal with it. Understand it. Figure out how you can use it to impact your life and the lives of those around you for the better. Say something useful, say something sad, say something stupid, say something mean. Say something factual, say something opiniated. Say anything. Don’t just sit there, passively being fed mindless information from huge companies.

People whine and bitch about how blogs don’t contain facts, that they just contain opinions. What the hell do they think they are getting from mainstream media? Certainly not undistorted untainted unopinionated facts. My god. It’s one of the naivest things I’ve ever heard.

Blogs are no different from the geocities homepages of like 5 years ago. Sure a lot of them were just about like people’s cats or their role-playing games or something seemingly unimportant in the grand scheme of things. But (1) those things ARE important, because they are real and people care about them and (2) building those sites trained a whole generation of people in the tools to communicate successfully over the internet, and in a lot of cases trained people like me in using web technologies which are now their livelihood, and which enable them to communicate even far greater things about their lives and about humanity than they ever would have or could have before. I think blogs are definitely doing that same thing right now for a whole new wave of people, and that’s really exciting to me, and I like to see what they have to say, and how they say it, whether its good or bad, big or small, stupid or smart. It’s important. It’s changing the face of human knowledge and it’s changing us. I think, for the better.