“Blogging is a form of vanity publishing …”

You have to love this leading line to the rest of his paragraph, which goes on : “You can dress it up in fancy terms, call it ‘paradigm shifting’ or a ‘disruptive technology’, the truth is that blogs consist of senseless teenage waffle. Adopting the blogger lifestyle is the literary equivalent of attaching tinselly-sprinkles to the handlebars of your bicycle.” (p ix).

want to read more? Swinburne Library has the title “Zero comments : blogging and critical internet culture / Geert Lovink”.

3 Comments

  1. Spod3 said,

    October 10, 2007 at 11:17 am

    From the same quoted paragraph: “The awful truth about blogging is that there are far more people who write blogs than actually read blogs.”

    303.4833 LOV-Z at Hawthorn library.

    Another quote (p. 23).
    “Not everyone is pleased that the untrained rabble now dares to speak in public … Why do they choose to expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel, and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers?”
    ( this quote is actually requoted from another book by Kline and Burnstein)

  2. 4paws said,

    October 11, 2007 at 11:17 am

    While not agreeing that blogging is just “teenage waffle” I do have some reservations about the 23 Things program. Although 23 Things has introduced me to Blogworld it has come at a price. Quite often it has taken me hours of work-time to complete an activity that for the more computer literate takes a few minutes. Participating in 23 Things has meant putting on hold other more important and pressing work tasks. This in turn creates stress. My work area has a timeline that must be met if we are to reach our annual target and remain popular with senior management. Although I am quite impressed with some of the 23 Things blogs I’ve seen I certainly do not have the time or skills to create anything more than a basic blog and I have as much chance of adding “tinselly-sprinkles” to my blog as I have of climbing Mt Everest or of flying to the moon.

  3. Finding blogs of interest: Technorati, Google Blogsearch, and the Blogroll « Dana’s user experience blog said,

    October 16, 2007 at 12:36 pm

    [...] Geert Lovink’s new book Zero Comments opens with a quotation from a blog post from 2005 (thanks Trees): …In the world of blogging “0 Comments” is an unambiguous statistic that means [...]

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