Ezra Klein blogs,
Farhad Manjoo’s piece on the collapsing distinction between blog posts and Web articles (or even normal articles) hasn’t attracted as much bloggy navel-gazing as it deserves, so let me try to add some.
Well, I read Manjoo’s piece and had half a mind to post about it last night, but then there are limits to how much blogging I can do and does this really warrant attention? Klein thinks so, enough for him to mention of it twice (if one counts inclusion in a “Reconciliation” post as a mention). That’s enough to get me to cough up my two cents. Beware: they’re curmudgeonly.
I don’t care! Much of the distinction in Manjoo’s piece is semantic or pertains to how websites lay out their content, in a chronological blog style or in a front-page news magazine style. How much does this matter to me? Not at all, because (a) as much as journalists and editors might fret over this, I don’t care what you call your work, and (b) I don’t visit websites for short shelf-life content. I use RSS. You should too.
By using RSS and consuming this stuff in a reader it all looks the same. The main distinction is full vs. partial feed. Those that only provide the latter get far less of my attention. (Longer rant on that here.)
