The blog goes on

(THE TIMES, February 15, 2006)

Sir, The main problem with the blogosphere (letters, Feb 9 and 11) — apart from its penchant for nauseating neologisms, such as “blogosphere” — is that, rather like academia, it is an incestuous community consisting mainly of people reading each other’s work, with success judged on how many links you can get to your site from people who are just as boring as you.

The “source” for the average blog post is another blog post, and finding the original source by clicking from one blog to the next is rather like that blonde joke where someone hands you a piece of paper with “turn over” written on both sides. Eventually you end up either at a real news story by the vilified and obsolete “MSM”, or back where you started.

The thing about incest is that while it lets the species continue to survive, its contribution to the quality of the gene pool is less than nothing.

SAMUEL BLANNING
Southampton