Why it's ok to have a blog

Why I Hate Personal Weblogs

First of all, I think he's a little hard on the aspiring authors.  Every artist has to start somewhere.

Second of all, he makes the assumption that the intended audience of every blog is everyone.  That's not true either.

My blog has three intended audiences:

• Personal friends & family who are interested in my daily happenings
• People needing computer tips (mostly for Linux)
• People looking for independent reviews of movies (also sometimes TV shows, music, and software)

I've made it clear from the beginning that if you're not in one of those three groups, then you shouldn't be here.  This is not my attempt to get attention or show the world how cool I am.  I have plenty of friends & family who give me attention, and my sense of self-worth is just fine without having to project myself into cyberspace.

Also, I've found lots of other blogs like mine: people who write on a variety of topics and aren't looking for fame or fortune.  Often, when I have a problem with linux and do a web search, I find the solution in someone's blog.  I've also seen many funny rants and reviews in blogs.

The final rebuttal to that guy's rant comes in the form of slashdot and digg.  Slashdot ranks all the bloggers and only shows you the best.  It's considered quite an honor to get slashdotted; it usually only happens to really sophisticated people with something really interesting to say.  These people may not be famous outside of cyberspace, but I definitely believe they contribute something to our culture.

Digg, similarly, allows users to vote for news stories they think are interesting in a variety of topics.  The result is a page that shows the stories that the (predominantly nerdy) community is interested in at the moment.  A lot of blog entries get dugg for the same reason they get slashdotted: because they have something interesting or amusing to say.

I know this isn't really a rebuttal because this guy admits most of these points in his rant.  Still, given things like target audiences, slashdot, and digg, blogs deserve more credit than he's giving them.