Funny analysis of the Bloggies from east west
"Livejournal is the single worst weblog application on the market, from their annoying bouncing kitty head emoticons that tell us how the author feels because they can't articulate for themselves..."

"The Friday Five: What can I say about The Friday Five other than it should be taken out in the backyard and shot because it's gone rabid, little Billy. For those bloggers who can't come up with an original thought for themselves, far too many have come to rely upon answering someone else's stupid questions, believing all the while that for some reason we the readers are actually interested. They are wrong."

I really don't want to step in this, but I should mention it: Bloggies controversy "of the nominees, as far as i know, the majority may well be there because of popular vote. there are about 5 or 6 nominees that should not be there because of unscrupulous tactics. would these have been nominated otherwise? I personally doubt it but now we and they will never know."

This is the dark side of blogging - the popularity contest, the high school attitude that there must be a hierarchy, and the bitterness that flows from those that feel they've been excluded from the "cool" people. I won't comment on the accusations, but I will say, apart from a few stellar examples of brilliant blogging, mostly from veteran bloggers, most of the nominees while they deserve recognition, really don't appeal to me. I'll admit, many of these I haven't read before, and I'm judging them on one look, but I can't see why there's so many blogs nominated that do nothing but babble about buffy or some reality show. I love the inane as much as anyone, but there are way too many smart, funny, knowledgable, enlightening writers out there, and I hope that people inside and outside the blogosphere won't ignore them when a handful get all the attention.

Just a few blog related links and quotes to make it look like I'm keeping up.

Unvoicing the Bloggers "And that's interesting to me. If comments are off, it means that you do not want to engage with readers. You do not want to hear what people have to say. You do not want to be challenged. That's well and good. All of us get tired of having to defend what we're saying."

Website 'Undesign' hits the International Press ""Weblogs have definitely affected the look and overall feel of the web," says San Francisco-based designer Jason Kottke, who has run a blog for over four years. "The design doesn't matter so much. It's not even really design . All [bloggers] want is something reasonably readable and distinct - and even the distinct part is optional." "

Are you out? (Jan 19th Entry) "Anything (everything) you do online will eventually come back to haunt you. So why do people post things online yet want to remain anonymous? It's like shouting things out in the middle of a deserted forest or writing things down in a journal. You want to send things out into the dark void with the distant hope that someone not entirely of your world will catch them and say, "Hey...me too."" Ah, again with the Dilemma.

Just posting this for my own future reference - Johnathon Delacour has a good post on the nature of trackbacks.

"I have no idea—to be honest, I don't really care—whether TrackBack will enable us to establish a more "truthful" web but it does seem to hold out the promise of allowing us to create more nuanced and inclusive relationships than a web based on links and PageRanks. Who knows? It might even reveal more of the very different thoughts that lie hidden, deep in our hearts."