Who’s afraid of David Bullard?

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For the last few days the tag cloud on Amatomu has been dominated by david bullard in big bold letters.

So out of curiosity I clicked on the first of the recent posts I saw that had David Bullard in the title, and I discovered he was a columnist in the Sunday Times who had written an article critical of blogs and blogging. This threw the cat among the pigeons — but which pigeons?

If you look at Amatomu’s categories, there’s only one of them where david bullard features in big bold letters (at the time of writing) - technology. In the other categories — news and politics, media and marketing, business, life etc, David Bullard features only in small letters, if at all.

I read Bullard’s article in the blog post, and wondered what all the fuss was about. Yes, the article was a touch defensive — the print medium was obviously feeling a bit threatened by the blog medium, and Bullard, earning his crust through print, was criticising blogs for their poor quality, their inane ramblings, their banality.

And of course he’s dead right. Technorati may proclaim that “There are 70 million blogs out there, some of them have got to be good.” I would say the emphasis is in the wrong place. Some of them have got to be good. But most of them are mediocre or worse.

Occasionally when I have nothing better to do I do some blog surfing on Blog Explosion. It’s divided into categories, so I can concentrate on the categories that interest me. But even then there’s a lot of very bad and very boring stuff out there. My pet peeve is the ones that apologise for not writing because they’ve had nothing to say — as if anybody cares, because even in the posts where they apologise for having nothing to say they still say nothing except that they’ve got nothing to say. I haven’t been keeping a count, but there are a lot of posts that say that kind of thing. Bullard is right. There’s a lot of very bad stuff out there.

But what about the print media? I missed Bullard’s article in the Sunday Times because I don’t normally buy the Sunday Times. I buy it only when the Sunday Independent is sold out. I used to buy it at one time in my life but I gave up when they devoted three full pages to Sol Kerzner’s birthday party.

I’m more likely to buy the Sun, especially when they have intriguing headlines like Zombie ate my soap.

So let’s face it, there are a lot of blogs that are a waste of words and a waste of electrons. But three pages on someone’s birthday party is a waste of trees, so the print media are not all that hot either.

So who’s afraid of David Bullard then? Looks like it’s the technogeeks. But don’t worry, at least you give the David Bullards of this world something to write about.

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Filed under Amatomu, South Africa, blogging, metablog

Tags: David Bullard, media