Welcome to 2ndEstate21’s bligablagablugablog, the blogginist blog in the blogosphere!

10:43:25 p.m. Feb. 3, 2005:

Well, for this, my seventh post in the last 12 hours, I’m going to type aimlessly about yet another thing that really irks me: personal Web logs.

Now, loyal reader (that is, Steve, Jerry or Dave), I know what you’re thinking. If I hate blogs so much, why do I maintain one so religiously? Well, it’s not my blog that upsets me so; it’s everyone else’s. You see, unlike the millions of other bloggers out there, the thoughtless, unedited drivel I spew out is actually meaningful to my faithful readers, and my unresearched, underconsidered opinions and embarrassing personal issues should actually be listened to.

So it’s to all those other bloggers that this rant is aimed at.

10:51:20 p.m. Feb. 3, 2005:

The logical place to begin analyzing blogs is their mechanics.

Every blogger must have a name for himself and his blog, a unique title to differentiate himself from all the other self absorbed yahoos out there relating their mundane experiences to anyone unfortunate enough to stumble across them. These titles are most often ham handed puns based on the blogger’s actual name but so nebulous or arcane that only the most dedicated or pathetic blogophiles can understand them.

A timestamp is another key ingredient to a blog. These figures, showing the time and date of each posting, show not only how often a blog is updated, but also the extent to which the writer lacks a life.

11:06:31 p.m. Feb. 3, 2005:

To illustrate to my readers why I despise blogs so much, I should probably tell a rambling personal anecdote that ultimately fails to shed any light on what I’m actually talking about, but instead reveals some hilariously damning secret about myself.

So back when I was in high school (but after I got on that acne medication!), just when blogs were starting to crop up on the Internet, a girl at our school began writing one. She filled it with the most ridiculous, clich‚ high school girl things you can imagine: How much she liked Jimmy, how her friend Jill flirted with Jimmy but promised it was nothing, how that Jill was a no good dirty slut with chlamydia who had sex with Jimmy in the concession booth at the football game, and how Jill was, like, so not invited to her graduation party. Well, word got around about the blog, which of course was easily searchable by the screen name the girl used and wrote in bubble letters on the cover of her notebook, and everyone started talking about it. When word finally got back to the girl that her secrets had been revealed, she freaked out and quickly posted a message on her blog warning that all content on the public Web site was private.

What does this story teach us? First, that personal blogs generally have no purpose beyond titillating and stupefying the voyeurs who read them. And second, these blogs are usually open to anyone with the wherewithal to find them, meaning there can be no expectation of privacy when writing in them. For example, I would never reveal on my blog that after much introspection and repeated listenings of “Tangled up in Blue,” I’ve concluded that my gay threshold stands at Bob Dylan. You just don’t put things like that out there for any schmuck on the Internet to read.

12:00:56 a.m. Feb. 4, 2005:

Political blogs, those pseudo professional operations that only discredit and embarrass real journalists, also piss me off, especially the way they’ve been hyped as an alternative to newspapers (the only true source of news and opinions!) and other news media. I’ll explain my complaints in depth in my next post, which you can expect as soon as I finish this Mountain Dew Code Red and check what DailyEditorStud just posted on his blog.