Somebody please explain this blog thing to me. Some time ago, someone suggested that I consider blogs as a possible tirade topic, but I put the suggestion at the bottom of the pile because I hadn't read any. I thought about perusing a few just to see what they were all about, but I am always far too busy sorting through all of the spam that continuously sneaks past my spam filter.

With the political fervor building in the U.S. (yes, we are blanketed with American news up here in Canada), I've come across numerous mentions of political blogs, so I decided that it was time to put my spam sorting on hold while I explored the blog phenomenon. After sifting through a number of them, I have come to one conclusion: I don't get it.

I have always strongly believed that free speech is a wonderful thing that is well worth defending fervently. After reading a few blogs, I'm not so sure. Most of them seem to be nothing more than outlets for extreme cases of verbal diarrhea.

The worst are personal blogs. They usually go something like this:

September 16, 2004 - 6:30am - I woke up as my clock radio played cool jazz. I think it was Ella Fitzgerald. I stayed in bed until the end of the song. I then went downstairs and made myself a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast with strawberry jam. It was that fancy jam from Switzerland that I told you about in yesterday's entry. I burned the toast and dropped an egg shell on the floor. I don't like burnt toast, but the jam was good. The eggs were just so-so. I think that I should have put more pepper on them--the eggs, not the toast and jam.

7:23am - I went back upstairs, took a shower, and shampooed my hair. I used that fancy dandruff shampoo that I saw in a commercial the other day. I don't have dandruff, but the shampoo bottle looks so cool.

And on it goes for the rest of the day and every equally boring day thereafter. Is there a single person in the entire world, including the author, who actually wants to read this steady stream of effluent? (In answer to what you are thinking, yes, I do know that many people ask the same question about my tirades.)

Undeniably, there are some worthwhile blogs on a variety of interesting and important topics. Some are written by knowledgeable, respected journalists who use blogs to provide more background on the stories that they cover. I don't intend to demean them. It's just that it is very difficult to find the valuable blogs among the extensive dross. I can usually recognize the ramblings of raving lunatics and avoid wasting more than a few seconds on their blogs, but there are many other people who can fabricate a convincing discussion on almost any subject even when they know absolutely nothing about anything. If I had enough knowledge and insight to distinguish between them and the true subject experts, then I would have no use for the blog in the first place.

That's the difference between blogs and more established, traditional media. Reputable publications, including this one, have editors who filter out most of the utter nonsense. How my columns managed to slip through is a total mystery to me. At the level of an academic journal, there is an extensive and often fierce peer-review process that catches most factual errors, screens out any conjectures that do not have sufficient evidence or argument behind them and, more fundamentally, determines whether an article ever sees the light of day. That is not the case with blogs. Any damn fool can write anything that he or she wants and pass it off as deep wisdom and/or entertainment, at virtually no cost except the considerable time expended by them and their readers. More often than not, it's a complete waste of perfectly good electrons.

I wouldn't mind if this were just some minor activity engaged in by one or two people. Nor would it bother me if it were merely a leisure pastime for a number of people, but it is not. I have not come across a consistent estimate of how many blogs there are out there, but one or two million seems to be a conservative guess. The more verbose of them can run for hundreds or thousands of words in each of a continuing series of entries. Considerable public acclaim may even appear to validate their professed importance to society, which means that they are being read by a great many people.

Think about this. With all of this blogging (doesn't that sound like a word I shouldn't be allowed to use here?) and blog-reading going on, a lot of it has to be happening at work. That seems just a tad unproductive to me. Why aren't I hearing more employer outrage over all of this wasted time? When I'm at work, my boss frequently becomes positively enraged, screams relentlessly at me about the time that I'm wasting on the Internet, and threatens to fire me because of it. Then I go to a shrink who reminds me that I'm self-employed, and everything is OK for a while--as long as I stop reading those ridiculous blogs.

Joel Klebanoff is a consultant, a writer, and president of Klebanoff Associates, Inc., a Toronto, Canada-based marketing communications firm. Joel has 25 years experience working in IT, first as a programmer/analyst and then as a marketer. He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto. Contact Joel at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Unfortunately, you can't find out what he had for breakfast on any blog, so don't bother looking.

Joel Klebanoff is a consultant, writer, and formerly president of Klebanoff Associates, Inc., a Toronto-based marketing communications firm. He has 30 years' experience in various IT capacities and now specializes in writing articles, white papers, and case studies for IT vendors and publications across North America. Joel is also the author of BYTE-ing Satire, a compilation of a year's worth of his columns. He holds a BS in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto.

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