Longfellow had a blog.
Really.
Somewhat cut off from everyday German student life, Longfellow and [his pal Edward Deering] Prebble diverted themselves by producing their own four-page, quarto-sized, handwritten newspaper...Mildly ribald in tone and full of student jokes, it was intended not for their families but for a small circle of male Portland intimates. Longfellow did most of the writing and drew the many illustrations, and Preble added comments or filled in the blank spots...
...Much of the text---snippets from their reading in several languages, allusions to politics back home, odds and ends of student lore---has lost its bite, but illustrations reveal Longfellow's unsuspected gift for caricature.---From Longellow: A Rediscovered Life. Charles C. Calhoun.
Snippets from their reading. Allusions to politics. Odds and ends. Small circle of readers. Sounds like a blog to me.
Calhoun goes on to describe the tone of Longfellow and Preble's newpaper.
"The satire is coarse, the humor sophomoric, the anger real."
Yep. Definitely a blog.
The New York Times Magazine has a piece on the rise of The Blogs. I'm not going to link to it because everyone of the blogs I'm linking to below links to it. The focus of the piece is on liberal political blogs, which is what you'd expect from the Times. If the Times can find a way it will convert its Sports section to politics, the way it has its Books section. But the celebrification of left (sort of left, anyway) bloggers has right wing bloggers hopping mad, according to Jesse over at Pendagon.
These are people who think that Al Gore thinks he invented the Internet and that proves Gore is crazy who now think that they both invented the blogosphere and simultaneously destroyed the Death Star known as the old Liberal Media, blowing it up with Grand Moff Rather still aboard.
Darth Koppel escaped but they'll track him down and rescue him from the dark side in Episode VI.
Michael Berube, whose humor is not sophomoric, whose satire is not coarse, but whose anger is real but productively sublimated into one of the most enjoyable and intelligent blogs in this or any other virtual reality, makes hay with the Times and with a dour, sour grapes throwing op-ed in the LA Times.
(I suspect Berube of being an android constructed by a super-intelligent alien race who've sent him to earth to humiliate all Earthling academics, writers, and would-be satirists, as well as fathers who think they're doing a good job, and middle-aged weekend jocks, with his preternatural brilliance, energy, good humor, devotion, and hockey prowess. But my friend Steve Kuusisto has met the guy and says he appears to be human, just way smarter and more productive and energetic than the rest of us, which makes him even more insufferable.)
Kevin Drum, as usual, has the most thoughtful take.
But my favorite response has been Matt Yglesias', naturally, because his opinion comes closest to my own.
...one good thing about the piece [sez Matt] is that it starts to bring out the extent to which there isn't much to say about blogs per se. It's a kind of technology that's used in wildly variant ways, as demonstrated by the enormous differences between Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and Wonkette. These sites are united, more or less, only in virtue of being produced by blogging software and by being popular. But we understand that a bestselling cookbook, a National Book Award winning novel, and Lies and The Lying Liars Who Tell Them don't have a great deal to do with each other all in virtue of being books.
The implicit by-the-by here is that blogs aren't anything but a content delivery system. That is, they're a way for people with a lot on their minds, and the arrogance to think that lots of other people want to hear it, to get the words out.
There's been a lot of breathlessness about the revolutionary nature of the internet, of the web, of personal webpages, of blogs.
(Or to put it the way it might appear on Typepad or Yahoo:
Internet>World Wide Web>Personal Web Page>Blog>Lance Mannion)
But little of the panting commentary takes into account that what we're talking about here is a lot of flashy new technology built around a component that's a result of a very old technology. There's a human being at every keyboard, doing what human beings have been doing from the beginning, buttonholing their neighbor and shouting into his ear, "Hey, pay attention to me when I'm talking!"
Longfellow and his friend's newspaper used the technology of the day to deliver content to their friends back home. Printing presses and packet boats and human beings working for the post office. I think what Ben Franklin and his brother were doing with their printing press was producing a blog. Poor Richard's Webpage. If the technology had been available in the 18th Century Hamilton and company would have produced the Federalist Blog. And St Paul was blogging to the Ephesians and the Colossians and the other ians.
In the beginning was the word.
And the word became pixels and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
The delivery system is a million times faster and the interface a lot prettier, of course. But I'm not sure that blogs are all that more efficient than broadsheets. In fact, there are times, when I'm staring glumly at my traffic stats, when I think that I'd be better off printing these entries on my Inkjet, going downtown to stand on a busy street corner, and handing them out to everyone passing by. At least some of them might read them before throwing them away.
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