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Oh, Am I Proud

Ladies and gentlemen, I treat you to a very interesting article by the dean of my school. In it, he discusses blogs. Do read for a fascinating insight to the dysfunctional relationship our dean seems to have with his own school.

It should be noted that he is speaking about a subject that a good number of his faculty and students are actually actively researching. Way to show support there, Dr. Cronin.

Comments (1)

You've got to admit, though, that for every informative weblog, there are a zillion and two that are totally pointless:

http://darthside.blogspot.com/
http://blondeoldnavygirl.blogspot.com/
http://thatpepsigirl.blogspot.com/
http://durrrrr.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_durrrrr_archive.html

I guess you could say that about websites in general, although the availability of free weblog software has probably contributed to the mess by making it trivially easy to publish online.

I think that, like search engines, weblogs are best for filtering information. Search engines are good at finding what you ask them to find. If you want information about, say, the LISP programming language, Google will hook you up. But if you wake up one morning and say to yourself, "I want to be surprised by something really interesting or cool" you can't use Google because you don't know exactly what you're looking for. Weblogs (some of them, at least) fill that gap.

One of the most interesting websites I've come across is http://www.omniglot.com. It's a website dedicated to different writing systems. I found that by following a link on someone's weblog. I don't think I would have found it otherwise, because before reading the site, it had never occurred to me that alphabets and writing systems could be interesting.

Weblogs are useful and beneficial, but only if you're willing to wade through the crap and only if you abandon the notion that the content and organization of websites should resemble what we find in paper documents.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on May 12, 2005 4:58 PM.

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