The blog people
It seems that not everybody is happy with the blogging phenomenon. Michael Gorman from the American Library Association thinks that bloggers are not "in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts" (I can't argue with that. :-D ). He even refers to us (hey, I am a blogger, after all, whether I like it or not) as "the blog people". That sounds to me just like "the mole people".
While I can't really contradict his views, I don't think that blogging should be discarded that easily. It's true that most bloggers aren't that cultivated, but blogging is an exercise of free speech. And that shouldn't be taken lightly. To paraphrase Richard Stallman, if you don't exercise a certain freedom, you won't mind losing it.
From a different point of view, although many blogs are full of "my dog has a fluffy tail", there are many others who are not just a waste of the reader's time. Take Mako's as an example; so far none of his humorous posts has disappointed me. ;-) Other, more technical blogs, while not as entertaining, are a valuable source of information. From this point of view, I find planet debian more interesting than slashdot, because the stories there are better matched with my own interests.
So, as far as blogging goes, there's enough out there for anyone's taste. And the good news is that, if you don't like blogging, you can just ignore it, 'cause it's not like it's jumping straight at you.
In other news, this site has suffered (or, rather, it has enjoyed ;-) ) a major reconstruction. From now on, it is maintained using the Website Meta Language, which is a combination of 9 different markup generation engines, Perl and M4 being two of them (can you say "kludge"? ;-) ). It's the same engine as the one powering the debian site. As a result, this entire site is static, and there's no CGI at all, anymore. And, thanks to tidy, it's XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant.
