Under the wire: Blump on a blog

OPINION: I signed up for a weblog account the other day. That’s right, my first one. Tech-savvy journalists, you understand, are all meant to have them — indeed, we’re supposed to have had them for years.

It’s a source of some minor embarrassment for me that I haven’t had one up until now.

My reasoning has been that, without wanting to sound pompous, if I want to espouse an opinion on anything, I can actually do so in print, with all the editorial oversight and sub editors and getting paid for it that that entails. Why would I want to do what I do for a living, but for free?

Well, for one thing, there would be no editorial oversight, so I could stray merrily from my brief without the risk of a meddling editor cutting my precious words.

Here in <i>CRN</i>, if I wanted to write about [this section excised by editor], I bet Byron would delete it, thus depriving my readers of such amusing, yet informative insights — just because it had nothing to do with anything that <i>CRN</i> ever covers. No such fears with my blog, of course.

Likewise, I can feel free to use whatever language I want on a blog. In print, of course, one has to think of clear and concise means of expression. On a blog, one can use words like [excised by editor] and [that one too] and the big one [you can’t be serious], and it comes across as “edgy” and “sophisticated” rather than inarticulate.

I can’t wait to start enjoying the freedom.

Here’s the thing: I haven’t written my first entry yet. By the time you read this, it will have been sitting there for probably a week or so, and I have every reason to expect that it will still be blank.

I’m conflicted, you see. I’ve had a look at a few other people’s first blog entries, and I’m amazed to see how many of them run along the lines of, “this is my first blog entry — yay me”, and variations thereupon. I’m reminded of the early days of wide mobile phone adoption, when every conversation you couldn’t help overhearing on the train included the phrase, "I’m on the train ... yes, I’m on my mobile", spoken at such a volume the poor interlocutor would have been wise to put the phone down and just listen at their window.

I am painfully self-conscious about not using my first blog entry to announce that I have made my first blog entry.

One strategy, I think, is to pretend it’s my second blog entry. I’ve looked at a few people’s second blog entries, but that’s even more disappointing.

A worrying number of people employ their second blog entries in the propagation of “memes”. Memes, for those of you not “in the know”, are roughly defined as evolving units of cultural transmission.

For those of you who think that sentence sounds like something starting with “wha?” and rhyming with “bank”, memes are like chain letters that you keep and stick to the fridge so everyone knows you answered them.

The idea is that you respond to a series of probing questions about the person you are, and post your answers so your friends can read them, and then your friends post their answers, and then their friends, and on it goes.

At one point, such things may have seemed like they had some cultural or communal value. The ones I read now, though, have instructions like, “Set your iPod to 'shuffle' and use the song titles to answer the following questions”.

Starts with “wha?” and rhymes with "bank".

Perhaps the most profound contribution I can make to the ecosystem would be to maintain a stoic silence on my blog — no swearing, no memes, no self-congratulation. Then I’ll have the greatest blog on earth, and everyone else can just [excised].

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