Hopefully that headline does not come as a surprise. After writing this blog for the past three and a half years, the curiosity about what others write became too powerful an urge to resist. It led to an interesting day of research. Frankly, the most profound shock after hours of study is that there are so damn many of them. Do all these people have that much time on their hands? Can they not find gainful employment?
And who is Warren Kinsella? Can one person really claim to have that much ego?
It is always interesting to read Andrew Coyne but he surprises the reader by falling into the most invidious of traps for bloggers. He overuses the pronoun “I.” It is an indication of lazy writing.
It was pleasant to note that the majority of the top bloggers are literate. While Kinsella goes too far by using words that need to be explained, most popular blogs have Fog indexes in the 9 to 11 range. (A Fog index of 9 means the writing is at a level easily read by a person who has had a year of high school. At the 11 range, you are using some words that the person needs a few years of high school to easily read.) Nobody is writing for dummies in political blogs but when you get an e-mail complaint saying the reader had to check three words in your last blog, you tend to cringe.
A possible exception to that is Jordon Cooper, a blogger in Saskatoon. You have to not only be well educated and intelligent to read his blog, you have to be interested. Once you figure out what he is talking about, it can be quite intriguing.
What is most puzzling about many of the blogs that were studied today is the awkwardness of manoeuvring around the material. It is never easy and the way they tend to link their material, you can be six blogs away from where you started before you know what has happened.
If there is one basic beef that could be had with many of these bloggers is that they think they are reporters. (Come to think of it, many of them are experienced reporters.) Please do not read Babel-on-the-Bay for breaking news. That is not the purpose of this blog. What Babel does is look for insight that goes beyond a reporter’s analysis. There is also a liberal slant to the material. It is this different take that Babel offers.
What was also a relief to see was that other bloggers might only write something once a week or even once each month. There is no urgency to do something every day. You are invited to read and enjoy and discuss what the blog has to say but you are not paying for it and if time is needed for better paying activities, you might miss a few postings.
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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry
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