Mr Edrei over at kamigoroshi.net has an interesting post on the current state of blogging in Malaysia. Change is an issue, and the kind of change is starting to become clearer with each passing month.

I feel that it’s become an issue of labels. If you want to have a ‘mackzul/jeffooi’ blog, you must satisfy certain requirements. If you wanna be a ‘boingboing’ type blog, you apparently need to satisfy certain requirements. This wasn’t how it was like about 4-5 years ago, as far as I remember.


I think we need to segregate between having an online presence and having a blog. Having a blog is such a fad, nowadays; even if you start up a blog/online diary now, you feel yourself sucked into the fad. If you’re not blogging of vlogging or photologging, you’re bloody podcasting. It’s bewildering!!! LOL…

I mean, just try it out (I know I have): pick any sensational news of the day and then blog about it. Then insert one pithy or eye-catching headline and voila! you have readership flooding to your blog. They don’t visit you because you have something interesting to say, they visit you because you have something sensational that they’re interested about.

It’s the same thing with personal blogs, don’t you think? Just headline your post with something sensational, exhibitionist, etc, and suddenly readership rises. It’s not just a fad, it’s like a *cult of instant gratification* and the consumers are the audience.

I wonder, for example, how many people actually bother to read M. Bakri Musa’s blog, or how many appreciate Farish Noor’s articles appearing on MackZul’s websites, because these sorts of posts don’t pretend to regurgitate news, they actually say something. That’s just so rare, nowadays.

I wonder if we’re becoming slaves to our audience, rather than being true to what we feel.

As an aside, I hate the word ‘blog-o-sphere’ for a reason: before ‘blogger’, all ‘blogs’ were just ‘online diaries’ on pitas, diaryland, diary-x, livejournal, you name it. And the people there were just real, I suppose. Now the whole scene has become ’sexed up’. It’s not disheartening lah (like macam we’re all old, jaded ‘bloggers’; I don’t think it’ll be fair for us to take a paternal stance like this), it’s just funny how far things have changed.

Has the change been for better or worse? It’s hard to judge. I can appreciate totoro’s sentiment about kids nowadays growing up with technology at their fingertips; it just wasn’t that way for quite a number of us, and the internet has taken dramatic turns in the intervening time. The internet in its current form is reflective of current cyberculture, and nay-sayers run the risk of sounding antiquated. But then maybe blogging will prove to be a short-lived fad. Who knows?

I remember 10-11 years ago how I used to kena scolding after scolding for dialing up singapore to play legend of the red dragon (LoRD) on BBSes. How times have *really* changed.

As far as online presences are concerned, you should check out one of the granddaddies, http://www.catb.org/~esr/.

aiyah, just some late night rants :p