Mmm...Ink

Via Eschaton, here's an interesting Andrew Orlowski article from The Register about the BloggerCon event. The most interesting stuff, though, is when he gets to the more general issue of the self-congratulatory nature of some blogging (a vice I'm sure I've succumbed to before, as have we all no doubt):

Cast your minds back to another 'revolution', the desktop-publishing era, when a combination of easy-to-use publishing software on cheap desktop computers, and low-cost laser printers, made it easy to publish newsletters and flyers for your community. The DTP era produced a deluge of bad design, aesthetic atrocities which were ridiculed by professional designers, but at no point did the tools vendors - Aldus, Adobe, Quark and Apple - treat this as a personal affront. This is what distinguishes today's tools vendors and their permaflunkies - a contingent of reporters, 'analysts' and marketeers who have unearthed a lucrative junket circuit by exploiting weblogging. Every attack on a lousy weblog is met with outrage. This terribly smacks of insecurity, and suggests they aren't concerned with quality as much as failing to discern volume. As if the solution to bad speech is lots more bad speech...

...The medium is not the message. Imagine how tedious newspapers would be if every other story proclaimed "We use INK!!!" The writers don't care, and the readers don't care, how this message was delivered: but readers do care about quality.