Online Blogs

When the movement started, I was skeptical, as the discussion of online bogs was either that conducted by elitists who poked fun of the cheesy online bogs as diaries of the dull or by SEO experts who identified online bogs as the latest trend for advertisers.  I was disappointed that this wonderful venue or system or whatever would be yet one more way to bastardize creativity with commercialized and selective targeting.

Then again, the statistics and studies are contradictory: for instance, one study covering four years finds that more men than women go online, while another study says women go online more than men do.  (Of course, as with any statistic you have to analyze closely, you should realize that women’s number would be higher as more women live on the planet than do men.)  It is also reported in some places that between the genders of online users, each has a different reason for going online: According to LBN (Levine Breaking News) and Business Report online, men use the net for news, sports, weather, and political and financial info, while women hit the net for social and religious purposes, to check in about health and “other personal problems,” to access religious information and to use email (more than men use it, evidently).


So who will benefit from the online bogs should be the focus here.  Well, since both genders seek some type of information, if you will, and since hundreds of online bogs have in many instances replaced other online formats, it is likely that those bogs with the most available, accessible, and relevant content will get the most attention.  So I guess I have to concede to the fact that commercial as we are, those bogs with the most traffic and those online bogs with the ads will therefore serve to not only provide information but (hopefully, in their writers’ minds) bring in the revenue.  I concede, too, to the fact that online bogs with their little ads for pimple cream are not as invasive as those pop-up ads and the ones that now ghost fly across the screen and are the least of our problems when filtering out the noise of commercial overkill.

Advertising gripes aside, though, some of the most awesome online bogs, for this reader, are those which either dispense valuable information or do so with a most entertaining style.  The following, then, may have no importance or value for you, unless you are also a writer or freelancer (or both) or a reader, a bibliophile.

Some of the best online bogs I have ever read (specifically rated as those which I READ as opposed to those which alienate the reader because they are too “busy” in design or too inundated with superfluous commercialism) are as follows:

Global Voices Online - http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/?p=238

Fish log - http://fishblog.blogspot.com/2004_07_11_fishblog_archive.html

Rake’s Progress - http://rakesprogress.typepad.com/

Beatrice - http://www.beatrice.com/archives/2005_11.html

Le Bolides - http://lebolide.blogspot.com/

Writing after Dark - http://writeafterdarkblogs.blogspot.com/

Bernie - http://www.benrik.co.uk/content/

Miss Shark, The Literary Agent - http://misssnark.blogspot.com/

As you might soon see if you visit one of these online bogs, is that my choices include those written by women, by men, for both women and men, and from many points of origin.  You might also note that few promotional sidebars accompany each bog entry, though the writers are doing just fine without ads for penis enlargers or mail-order brides or grooms.