Meet the Bloggers

I suspect that half the British weblogging community will be linking to BBC Radio 4’s Meet the Bloggers series, featuring brief interviews with a variety of webloggers. I haven’t had a chance to listen to the first episode yet, but I will catch up with it over the next few days.

I’m mildly surprised that I’ve at least seen nine out of the ten sites chosen, and that I read several of them on a regular basis; I’d rather assumed that I was out of touch with the current weblogging scene. I used to try to cast an eye over new entries on the old GBlogs list whenever new weblogs showed up, but by the time that list went offline the growth of the ‘community’ was such that it was pretty impractical to keep up with the sites I was already reading and find time to cast an eye over every new site that showed up. I rely on word of mouth to point out new sites to me nowadays. (Although this site is listed at the BritBlog site, I’ve never made any use of that site’s Latest BritBlogs facility. Partly it’s because I don’t find that geographical proximity correlates very strongly with my interest in a site.)

Anyway, I’m rambling. The point I intended to make was that I think it’s a pity that not one of the sites whose authors the BBC is interviewing is a traditional linklog. The nearest thing to a linklog among the sites the BBC features is Instapundit, I suppose. Admittedly, it’s trickier to get across to a radio audience how a linklog works than it is with an online journal^* or a site where the author writes mini-essays which may or may not include a link to an external site, since for the latter types of site you can have the author read an entry or two and thereby give listeners a sense of what the site is like. However, if the idea of the BBC’s series is to give a sense of why people write weblogs and what they’re trying to achieve by writing them, surely the main point is to get the authors to talk engagingly and informatively about their site, rather than to find sites which hold content which can easily be translated into a radio programme. It would have been good to see someone who writes a linklog on the BBC’s list: Darren from LinkMachineGo, say, or Lindsay of Bifurcated Rivets. (Obviously I have no idea whether either of them was approached by the BBC. But even if they both declined to appear, if the BBC had wanted to I’m sure it could have found someone who writes a linklog, was willing to talk on the radio and was capable of sounding interesting and explaining their interest in the medium of weblogs.)

^* Which is what most weblogs seem to be nowadays - I think the meaning of the word ‘weblog’ is as fuzzy as that of the term ‘hacker’ nowadays.

For the avoidance of doubt, I want to make it clear that I have nothing whatsoever against online journals or sites where the author rambles on about whatever’s on their mind - as I say, I read several of the sites the BBC series features, and quite a few more such sites they didn’t. (And of course at times I ramble on myself right on this very linklog.) I just wish that the BBC’s series on weblogs would reflect the fact that when Jorn Barger coined the term he was talking about a site that ‘logged’ the neat sites the author had found that day.