I had a conversation last week where we agreed on something that I hadn’t thought about before: The bloggers we both liked best were people who spent most of their time doing other things than blog. They find a few minutes for blogging here and there between doing other things, and still find time to get stuff out there on a daily basis, but they don’t spend the bulk of their time blogging.
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I woke myself up to the world of RSS readers and blogs only 6 months ago. I tend to agree with Paul’s statement because I have learned there are at least 3 types: bloggers, pretend journalists and journalists. I like the good ones on the two ends – but I can’t stand the ones in the middle (who don’t seem to have much else to do). For me, these are the people that scan their own RSS readers and then try to report a story that they found there as if it’s news. Don’t get me wrong, I love intelligent commentary on recent news. And if it’s truly a scarce little tidbit that no one could find unless they spoke Farsi, then that’s ok too. But I was frustrated when I clicked through to 7 bloggers last week (not news sources) who simply told me that the WSJ was reporting a new Google pay service with absolutely no commentary on what they thought it meant. They need to know their RSS reader is no better than mine. Some may feel they have their audience, but aren’t the odds good today that the audience is the same type as me, scanning an RSS reader? I suppose this will sort itself out in the end as I will learn to remove group 2 from my reader altogether. At the back of my mind, I feel like there may be a much better solution: some kind of original source/permalink that could be the cultural standard for how we trace news on the Internet and give credit for people’s amazing journalism, making the “web conversation” less like chatter and the bad bloggers less like bad RSS software.