For months I’ve been proactively trying to cut down on the number of RSS feeds I’m subscribed to because, these days, I rarely get a chance to check more than a dozen of them each day anyway. There’s something about hitting the 200 unread posts per blog limit on bloglines that fills me with dread – and leads to bizarre incidents where I have to close my eyes and click on feeds randomly because I just can’t face missing all that content knowingly.
I did describe those as “bizarre incidents”.
My point in telling you this is not so that you immediately run a mile but, instead, so that you realise that I must really really really be impressed with a blog these days to subscribe to it. Well, today someone sent me a link to a cutting post on DoctorVee, a blog I hadn’t come across before:
“As usual for a Sunday, I woke up this morning listening to Julian Worricker’s programme on Radio Five Live. Today, in place of the Five Live Report, was a one-off programme about “Blogging in the UK”.
“Oh, that’ll be interesting,” I thought, so I stayed in bed and waited for it to come on. I was to discover that the programme wasn’t about blogging at all.
Blogging in the UK was originally part of ‘Your Five Live’, which I mentioned in my post about user generated content. Specifically, it was a feature of Five Live’s Breakfast programme.
The idea was to take a day during ‘Your Five Live’ week — the 22nd of January — and encourage as many first time bloggers to write about their day. The results are predictably awful, reinforcing the stereotypes about how bloggers are just people who write about what they had for breakfast.
And it shows just how little whoever came up with the idea actually knows about what blogging is about. For a start, the entries were posted by users in the comments of the Breakfast programme’s blog. This isn’t blogging. This is just a list of people’s mundane day to day activities.”
DoctorVee reaches parts that other blogs don’t touch with posts like User generated content doesn’t belong on the mainstream media , Blogging takes no time at all , Broadcasters should now be biased if they want to be and Warning: This is a navel-gazing post about blogging, and they are the worst.
I realise that some of these posts are near enough a year old now which means that I’m rather late to the party. To make up for it, I not only left a comment and wrote this nice post, I’ve added DoctorVee, written by a Duncan Steven in Fife, to my feed subscriptions and added him to my delicious network too. I see some of my workmates have already done the same…
Wow, thanks for the kind words! I hope you aren’t too disappointed in my future posts which probably won’t touch on this issue very often!
I’m worried that I might come across as a bit of a grumpy old (young!) cynic in those posts that you’ve linked to (from what I can remember of them anyway). Certainly with the most recent two posts in your list, I was very negative about what I was hearing on the radio and television.
I realised this when Chris Vallance linked [http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/podsandblogs/2007/02/live_blogging_beyond_broadcast_1.shtml] to my post saying I had very strong views. Now I am cutting as well! I didn’t mean to be! I like a lot of what goes on and I think there is a lot of potential in the area.
UGC is bound to come in useful for all sorts of stories you see in the mainstream media. It’s just that they need to know when it is the right time to use it. Most of the time it is just empty bangwagon-hopping.
By the way, it’s S-T-E-P-H-E-N. :)