Blog-a-Doodle-Do

I have noted a worrying trend within the blogging community in the last year or so. I used to read quite a few of the things, some of the writers I knew and others I didn't. But there was always plenty of interesting stuff to read out there. At its heart, blogging is the province of the amateur writer, a route to publication for those that otherwise get ignored. And it's intoxicating stuff. You write something, it gets published worldwide immediately and if a few people actually read it, it can be quite pleasing.

Trouble is, people seem to be getting bored of blogs. Several people I used to follow have now either stopped posting completely or have got interested in other things like Facebook or the dreaded Twitter. In other quarters blogging has been adopted by professional writers to plug their work, by old fashioned print media to appear relevant and by highly motivated political activists who seem to have garnered a lot of attention for themselves. Sadly, this all leaves the humble 'amateur writer' blog in a minority. I now see people winning awards for blogs I've never heard of, and when I have visited them, the writing has left me cold.

Legislation is starting to emerge, saying that if you endorse a product you must by law disclose whether you've received payment from the company that makes it. I don't know what saddens me more, the fact that people are doing this so much that laws need to be passed, or that companies are that shameless. And when governments start to legislate the internet, it's the beginning of the end. Up to now the net has been pretty free and ungoverned. And on the whole that has made it a good place to be. But recently there have been a number of attacks on that freedom. A man was prosecuted in the UK earlier this year for a public order offence because of something written on a blog. Another was forced to reveal his identity because he was in the police force and was saying negative things about his employers. He was later disciplined. So much for freedom of speech. And just this last week a court summons was served on Twitter for someone who was otherwise untraceable. I'd have loved to have heard counsel explain that one to a judge.

I suppose what I want to say in this post is that I fear that the world of blogging is being slowly destroyed. But you see that only makes me want to do it all the more. Does anyone actually read these political blogs, except for the mentally uncertain ? And when the BBC says 'read our sports blog' does anybody really believe it's a proper blog rather than a journalist sat at the same desk that he knocks out his normal copy at ? So I plan to carry on as long as I can, precisely because I'm not fervently right/left wing, an employee of a huge news organisation who thinks they can fool the public or a published writer trying to work the fact that they have a new book out into every sentence. I'm just a normal bloke, sat in his spare bedroom, tapping away on an ancient Dell computer. To me, that's what blogging ought to be about.