Still playing catch-up with things, my trips are fairly horrible this month and I’ve been in a continuous state of grogginess. Dazed and Confused. That’d be me.
I did want to address last week’s hullabaloo (always wanted to use that word somewhere) over bloggers and their posts that Jeff Freeman, Ryan Shwayder, Tobold and others got into. I’m intentionally not linking, that’d just make matters worse given this particular topic. Anyway, they were basically hashing over their annoyance when bloggers rehash the same tired old themes. In this case, “bloggers” meaning “gaming bloggers” or specifically “MMO bloggers.” There are well over 100,000 gaming-related blogs already. Most likely, anything said on any one of them has already been said before. Guess what? It’s going to be said again, too. Practically every thought, every idea any human has today has been thought of before over the course of humanity. I don’t expect everyone to rush to an encyclopedic database to scan for similarities of their thought processes before voicing those thoughts. In the case of this site, PI.net is my personal blog, not a site of professional journalism. I express my thoughts and feelings, my rants and raves over issues in the MMO or video game genres. I am very well aware that anything I write has probably been discussed already. I may have even written an article on the same topic myself on a previous iteration of this site. Perhaps the new article has my new take on the topic however. Perhaps, much like the overall MMO blogosphere is doing a 180 on its opinion of Tabula Rasa, my opinion has changed from my original stance. Or maybe I just want the opportunity to express my own feelings in my own words about anything I want. Isn’t that what blogs provide?
In the end, I hearken back to a favorite saying of one of my English professors: write as if no one is reading. Put your thoughts down on paper pixels because even though the ideas, concepts, or themes behind the topic you write about is not original, what you write is uniquely yours and stems from your own unique creativity.
Unfortunately, since the server crash, I’m quite literally writing for no one but that’s ok — it’s a venue for expression and that is my primary goal. It also provides the ability to look back in time and read my exact thoughts on whatever topic I was writing about, and I don’t have to keep stacks of papers and records to track those thoughts.
As I sign off, just to pay homage to SmakenDaHed’s comment that I like to split hairs: I don’t consider myself a “blogger” at all. I’m just some guy who has blog. The difference? To me a blogger is someone who updates quite frequently with relevant content. I write what I want, when I want. Maybe that’s splitting hairs, maybe not, but it’s how I’ve always viewed things. Back when blogging first started becoming popular, I jumped on the bandwagon. I ran a fan-news site for what used to be the MSN Gaming Zone and was diligent in a very Blues News style twitch reporting, in addition to writing blog-style posts. I didn’t have a CMS then, so in addition to the writing, I had to hand-code each entry and upload to the server, then turn around and hand-code the XML for the RSS feed. So I’ve been a “blogger” as well. I have a different job now, and quite frankly I don’t always have something to say on every single little issue or news byte that everyone else jumps on. A lot of times I’d rather play the games with friends than take a few hours formulating an article. Is that so bad?
Tags: Whatever
on 
Entries (RSS)
Really, that was a bit of a misconception regarding just what it was the counter-rant at Plaguelands was getting on to me about.
I think Tobold misunderstood it to mean I had whined about rehashing old themes (reading plaguelands’ response to my post, but not my post), and then others read Tobold’s commentary on Plaguelands’ post (but not that post), and definitely took that to mean I had whined about rehashing old posts.
What I was actually complaining about was ridiculous, and what Plaguelands’ post was calling me on was my being a jerk.
But I can tell ya, it’s hard to write as though no one is reading when they leave comments about your writing right there on it, or (maybe worse) on their own blog that you probably won’t ever even see…
Agree with you that the whole blogger/blogging terminology is kinda silly. They’ve been giving away web space with internet access since forever – way before there was any good way of putting stuff on it – and now that there are tools to make updating that web space trivial, oh suddenly it’s some new thing, and some new breed of human is doing it!
Psh.
Obviously the whole “not linking” thing backfired on me! Ha! (How do you guys find this?) I hope my post didn’t read as being accusatory; I know some of the other bloggers were. I just rattled off the ones I actually took the time to read and yours was one. Otherwise I was just getting my point of view out there.