Retro Yakking

Regular readers will be getting used to these ‘…is stupid‘ posts, a series of articles aggressively criticising a website, item or group of people whilst conveniently ignoring the good elements of said entity. They’re a bit of a cross between The Encyclopedia of Stupid and James Rolfe’s ‘You Know What’s Bull****‘ series, except with more of a northern twist.

It is widely accepted that one of the first web users to compile what is now known as a ‘blog’ was student Justin Hall at Justin’s Links from the Underground. Though he wasn’t the very first blogger, he certainly became one of the most ‘famous’ on the early web, notably for his 1994 guided tour of the web.

Hall’s blog still runs to this day, and is a perfect example of what a blog is: a load of opinionated nonsense that not many people outside your immediate circle of family and friends would give the time of day. Except Hall’s family was the immediate online community.

A blog that transcends such boundaries is a relative rarity these days: research suggests that 97.3% of all weblogs on the internet contain completely pointless information of no use to 99.9recurring% of the world’s population. The common blog has a poor reputation, and for good reason. The statistics seem to prove the majority of bloggers are goths and social outcasts, sometimes both; the number of bad blogs far outweigh the good ones, so they really aren’t worth your time.

Let me give you an example, one of the worst blogs in the world, in fact: Malcolm Leeman. Here is an extract from said ‘website’, and I use that term extremely loosely:

Heyya yalls first blog cuz I am the man…….umm start off ladies im a little concieted about myself i am a sexii beast hehhee and second of all ladies ummm im kinda taken so HAHAHA to bad for you………Lyndsey is her name she is the most perfact beautiful intelegant and funny girl i could ever meet… — Malcolm Leeman

Need I even go on? Worse, there are probably thousands, perhaps millions of similar blogs out there on the Internet just waiting for you to stumble across them. Makes you want to cancel your Virgin Broadband subscription, doesn’t it?

Worse still, this blog is relatively tame as far as design goes. You may be lucky and accidentally come across a blog that uses one of the tolerable default templates, but if you find a wannabe web design blogger, then may the Lord have mercy upon you.

We haven’t even mentioned the ones that auto-play music and video when you load them up: you know then that you are truly in the pits of Hell. I would like to go round to these peoples’ houses and personally see to it that all the beer is removed from their refrigerators. Or, if they are under 18 (which is more likely), I shall steal their milk.

That’s right. My hatred for these kinds of bloggers is so great that I would resort to stealing milk from a child. And on that note, I’d better draw this post to a swift close before the NSPCC get wind of my intentions.

Today, we have only scratched the surface of why blogs suck. There are countless other reasons, too many to fit in this post, but I wanted to give a brief overview of the general pantsness of the modern common blog. This saga may well be continued at some point in the future, past, present or lunchtime

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