In defence of blogging

Matt is right in one sense: the term ‘blogging’ sounds oddly old-fashioned. Blogs were big a decade or so ago – everyone was at it on Blogger, wordpress.com and Typepad, banging out all sorts of updates.

Now, you’ve got Facebook and Twitter for that what I had for dinner stuff, but some of us are still writing posts on blogs. Or blogging. The content is generally more professional, and in most ways better, which goes to show the format isn’t inherently worthless. But we haven’t suddenly become journalists, publishers or even writers.

One of the joys of the internet is that anyone can post stuff. That means there’s lots of crap out there, but you can also find original, well crafted prose from amateurs and beginners. Terms like publish, journal and anthology suggest some form of expert review and editing, which necessarily acts as a bar to expression.

These words come from the traditional, print world of magazines, books and academic journals. The web is different – democratic and disorderly. Let’s embrace an appropriate – ugly, even – lingo to describe it.