The days of amateurism in the blogosphere are over, and I'll miss them. But I can't get further into what I promise will be a very, very brief eulogy without making an important distinction: amateurishness is alive, it's amateurism that's dead. That is to say, the days of bad writing and worse punctuation live on. The days of some schmuck with a day job setting up a Blogger page to share an interesting persepctive on something, and three months later being read by 100,000 people a day are over.

I'm probably making up or misusing one or both of those words, but fuck off -- I'm an amateur.

For me, the end is represented by Nick Denton, though I do think it was an inevitable side-effect of the glut of sites and the way everything eventually gets bought by Time Warner. Now, the blogosphere is like the CFL. We've got a few people who made it up from the gridirons of St. Catherines and Saskatoon, but mostly we've got big name rejects from the NFL.

But to be fair, I really like The Huffington Post. Especially lately. I think Arianna Huffington's perspectives of the past few years align with mine -- left, but much more so socially than economically, anti-Bush, anti-war, vaguely anti-Hillary.

That said, I find the premise that reading a poorly thought out screed by Steven Weber is somehow more satisfying than reading the poorly thought out screed of someone who wasn't on Wings to be dubious.

Or maybe genius, but I can't be sure Arianna is framing the view of Weber the same way I am.

Analogcabin @ 10:13 AM
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