This is a blog. Schizophrenic though it may be, but I am fundamentally against blogging. I believe that there is a humongous mountain of absolutely wonderfully written totally worthwhile news, views, and analysis out there, and most of it is available to you via the wonder that is the Internet and the WWW, and so there is absolutely no need for anyone to waste time reading blogs. Go read a book, instead.

All in all, blogging is a self-indulgent waste of time, especially for the reader. For the writer, it could have some redeeming features such as the opportunity to learn how to write, to expound on topics of interest, or even to just maintain a store of interesting tidbits one has collected on one random walks across cyberspace.

I used to write a lot on the Usenet years ago. Blogging to me is a second-best substitute to writing on the Usenet. Sure the Usenet exists but it is no longer what it was, the noise to signal ratio is through the roof.

What brought on this line of thought was an article that Prashant Kothari sent the link to called Time for the Last Post. I think it is a must-read. Here are two paragraphs, just for the record.

But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold – a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave “new economy” a few years ago?

. . .

And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts – a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.