Blogging: Better than Moldering Cheese

For years, my main hangout spots on the Net were Usenet newsgroups, which I have just about left behind completely. Blogistan, I am finding, is a much more convivial place, for a lot of reasons.

The biggest reason is that Usenet groups are divided by category and subject, whereas blogs are not. On Usenet, this is a device of convenience: if you want to discuss, say, science fiction books, you find the newsgroup specifically devoted to them, and there you will find (theoretically) lots of people of similar interest. But problems then crop up: some active newsgroup participants tend to be militant about remaining "on topic" (i.e., "This is rec.art.sf.written. Don't mention movies here."), where others are more forgiving. One person on rec.arts.books (a group which I have not read in over two years now) once described this conundrum this way: "Some people view rec.arts.books as a place to discuss books and nothing else; others view it as a place for bookish people to discuss anything they like." But with blogs, the only topical constraints are self-imposed by the person writing the blog.

And that leads me to what makes Blogistan a more friendly place, even if there are occasional outbreaks of scandal and whatnot. With the pressure of topicality removed, or placed into the purview of the blogger him- or herself, it's a lot easier to get a handle on a blogger's personality than it is on Usenet. On newsgroups, I often observed (and occasionally fell victim to) instances of posters forming allegiances with one another on one contentious topic, only to discover later on that they disagreed vehemently on another topic. And almost always, whenever this happened, the earlier civility was completely forgotten as the new enmities took over. The short version of this is that respect, in Blogistan, seems to be more robust than on Usenet.

This is just my experience, of course, and as always, nothing I say in this post should be interpreted as having any larger point than simply reporting my own experience. Except, of course, for when I am completely correct in every way. Or something like that.