I am often astonished by the amounts of articles that bloggers write about … well … blogging. It’s as if they are stuck in an echo-chamber, all screaming the same thing, and amazed to find that everybody agrees with them. I think it’s time to face facts.

Blogging is nothing new. It’s nothing revolutionary. It’s nothing amazing. When you really think about it from a techincal point of view, a blog is nothing more than a “content managment system.” A blog simply makes it easy to publish information to the internet. But, it’s not anything new.

I remember when I started my first website, back in 1999 I believe it was. I used one of the free webhosting companies and hard-coded HTML files. My website had a section dedicated to basketball, one to surfing (I lived in California at the time), and some other random stuff. It was kind of cool having your own website back then, especially for a 15-year-old living in Silicon Valley. The only problem was that everything looked so horrible and was so complicated. Every time I wanted to change something I would have to manually change the HTML file. If I wanted to add a link to something new, I had to go into all of the pages one by one and change that specific section. Needless to say, my website never really become a Silicon Valley success story. But then, not many of them did.

Fast forward to the age of Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, and their ilk. What was so great about them and made them so popular? Esentially they did the same thing that websites like GeoCities (first home of my amazing collection of usuless information) did before them, but with one difference. These blogging services made it a lot easier to mainting a website. You could simply pick a template, name your blog, and start “publishing.”

Now fast forward once again to 2009. Newspapers are going down the hill while bloggers stand ready to dance on their graves. Bloggers plunder and pillage news stories, often posting the whole article in blockqoutes, and claim they are simply helping to “drive traffic” to news websites.  If a blog is a “content managment system”, than professional journalists have been diminished to the task of gathering content for everybody to post on their blog. I am guilty of it too. Sometimes I see a breaking story and I want to write about it. I want to provide my expert commentary that the world so desperately needs. But as a journalism student I feel bad just copying the work of others. I know I should at least paraphrase it. But that can be hard work.  I also feel guilty for not actually calling up some sources to verify the story, to add more information to it, to get more insight. But that would be hard work, too.

So don’t get me wrong, I love blogging and I think it’s a valuable and powerful tool. But that’s all it is: a tool. Having a blog today doesn’t make you a writer anymore than having a typewriter did in the 70s. No matter which medium you are producing content in  (newspapers, TV, radio, blogs) it still comes down to the quality of your work. And maybe if bloggers get over themselves they will realize that they are not part of some “internet revolution”, but simply part of the evolution of the world. From drawings about hunting Mamnoths on caves to instantly publishing articles worldwide, we are still essentially doing the same thing. Telling stories and sharing ideas.