Amateur Reporters

Winer writes:

The problem is that they're not bloggers, they're reporters and they work for a company that's not a blog, it's a publication. Publishing stuff on the web with blogging software says nothing about the people and what they write.  

A blogger is person who has an idea, expertise or opinion who wants to convey that to other people. The unedited voice of a person. What makes a blogger interesting is that they do something other than writing a blog. If all you do is write a blog, and if you want or need to make money from your blogging, it's really hard to distinguish what you're doing from what professionals who don't use the web (are there any left?) do. 

Amen. With what's currently considered a "tech blogger" I really, really don't want to be in that crowd. When I look at TechMeme, the scene seems to be increasingly degenerating into a bunch of self-congratulating, "Boy, am I important", corrupt attention whores seekers who are pimping themselves out to PR bribes and advertising traffic without having much of an original idea themselves.    

Turns out that I much prefer TechMeme's sister site WeSmirch these days. The drama is the same, but the people being talked about are either in entertainment and make a mess out of themselves for a living or are wrecks much beyond what a geek would ever become. That's more fun to watch. A pissing match between TechCrunch and Blognation or whether some stupid idiot from Gizmodo gets thrown out of CES is so very interesting that I rather keep track of what Britney is up to.