Washington Post blogger Joel Aschenbach writes a funny (almost as funny as the accompanying illustration) take on blogs taking on a mind of their own:
I constantly tell myself: Ignore the blog. Do your work. You are an enormous literary figure and cultural icon, not a mere “blogger.” You must produce high-end journalism with grand themes and huge groaning multi-syllabic words like “eschatological,” and you can’t be dribbling away all your ideas on the blog. Be strong! Resist the blog!
And then . . . I hear it yowling.
Rough Draft
(Richard Thompson)The blog is hungry. The blog will not be ignored. It is an insatiable little beast, a creature still unclassified by science — hairy, warty, slobbering, with its own fiendish agenda. I often fantasize about killing the blog, but I worry that it will respond just like the crazed computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey”: It will try to kill me first.
The blog originated in January as a catch basin for mental detritus, for the kind of stuff not good enough for print, but too good to waste on casual conversation or, worse, mere thinking. But this spring I began allowing “comments,” and the blog suddenly mutated. America, it turns out, is full of smart, clever, creative people who happen to have no interest in working and whose employers have unwisely given them Internet access. Thus every day, on my blog, these strangers show up, just to shoot the breeze, flirt, kvetch, veer off topic and, most of all, pay zero attention to what I have written.
Let’s cut to the chase: The blog ignores me.