WHO LET THE BLOGS OUT?: A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs

This overview of Web logs, the currently voguish online journals, begins with a tale about a Buddhist monastery "long ago" that used strings to connect documents in a prototypical Internet. The episode is typical of Stone's approach: facts may be interesting enough on their own, but why not dress them up with snazzy distortions? In this work, Stone emulates the worst qualities of many of the unpolished blogs he celebrates. The prose, reading like it was churned out on the fly, is terminally in love with its own hipness, mistaking generalization for profundity and a lack of critical discrimination for democratization. Some of the claims about blogs, such as the notion they are "hooking people up with book deals willy-nilly," are hyperbolic, while others are simply ridiculous (e.g., despite Stone's assertions, "traditional web pages" had "context" long before blogs became popular). As a "senior blogger specialist for Google," Stone's cheerleading is not unexpected, but its clownishness is an overwhelming distraction from the kernels of useful information about the various blogging software manufacturers and their tools. (Dec. 1)