One of my heroes is a curmudgeonly fellow named Harlan Ellison. He is famous for ranting and raving and occasionally writing some pretty damned good sci fi, or SF as he might prefer it to be called. Once upon a time he was on about Video Games. He called them time sinks, said they were a waste of time, that you could be doing something, anything, better than playing video games. There is that feeling about blogs as well.
And yet.
Nothing pains the writer so much as never being published. As never seeing a byline or buying up all the copies of that magazine with your article inside. What does it matter that the thing has almost no readership? Your in print, at last! And so it is that a blog has a nice feeling of doing, even if no one reads it.
Of course, there is always some tiny chance that you might be the next blog featured on some news show. Idiot blogger says chocolate costs too much was the last such story I saw. They didn’t give the blog’s name, but still, that’s a cool bit of fame, isn’t it? I have always been baffled by the Little Green Footballs and Instapundits of the world. Yes they seem to have a bazillion hits, and no, I can’t for the life of me see why. So I will not be the next Boing Boing. I know, these guys are not even the big dogs anymore, but at least I have read them once in a while.
The trouble is having nothing to say, and then going ahead and saying it.
