Driver, Stop Please

In the early days, the blogosphere belonged to people who wanted to talk without worrying too much about money. There were few limits on what you could write about. You could discuss something you had bought, explain how something worked, share a useful link, or spend several paragraphs thinking out loud about an idea that probably interested only twelve people.

That was part of the appeal.

There were blogs of every kind, but many of them were built around personal knowledge rather than general consumer information. You learned what someone liked, what they used, what they avoided, and why they thought something was good. The subject mattered, but the person behind it mattered more.

Then blogs began crossing into commercial territory. Google launched AdSense, making it simple to place a few text ads on a page and earn some money. Soon, blogs with one or two banners started appearing everywhere. At first, I do not think many people believed this would affect a blogger’s reputation or credibility. It did not seem to change their desire to write, and the frequency of their posts was mostly irrelevant. For a while, things remained relatively pleasant. As the number of blogs grew, though, I began to notice a change. Writing was no longer always about communicating with other people. Increasingly, it was about generating income.

The usual explanation was, “I added these banners to pay for hosting.” That argument may have worked the first few times, but eventually it became unnecessary. Nobody needs to justify putting one or two advertisements on a personal site. It is their space, their life, and their decision. Readers are not paying to enter, so nobody is being cheated. There is no need to apologize.

Apparently, one or two banners were not enough.

Over time, more sites appeared with more advertising. Product-review blogs flourished, and themed blog networks became increasingly common. They were still a minority inside the larger attention bubbles, but they started to look like the model everyone was expected to follow. I tried not to pay too much attention to the change. I continued reading what interested me and joining conversations whenever I could. That exchange was still valuable, certainly more valuable than a banner or a monthly check for one, two, or three hundred euros.

The problem was not advertising itself. The problem was what happened to the writing.

Before, I read a blogger because they published things that sounded like them. A post usually contained a peculiar mixture of personal opinions, links, irony, comments, arguments, and half-finished thoughts. It was not always polished, but it had a recognizable owner. With the arrival of this small blogging economy, many sites stopped treating writing as an investment of the author’s time and began treating it as a production requirement. Content had to be generated because content generated money.

I do not think earning money from writing is bad. I worked for a magazine, made good money doing it, and stayed in plenty of five-star hotels because of it. But I never saw a blog in the same way.

I rarely enjoyed magazines because too many articles arrived wrapped in false modesty, borrowed ideas, or the same unnecessary machinery found in newspapers. You could read the same story in several publications, with only minor differences between them. Newspapers, at least, have always had a limited number of opinion columns and a rather questionable relationship with objectivity.

I read blogs because the blogosphere is the largest concentration of columnists in the universe.

People want to know what other people think. They do not always want another report about what happened. They want the interpretation, the reaction, the strange connection, the personal argument. They want the part that would never survive an editorial meeting. When every post begins to follow a detectable formula, that value starts disappearing. Personal writing becomes editorialized, systematized, and eventually transformed into a small news bulletin. The opinion is removed because opinions take time, invite disagreement, and do not scale particularly well. That is when inexperienced observers look at the blogosphere and call it a world of spam. They are exaggerating, but they are not entirely wrong.

When I worked at the magazine, some writers spent a month preparing an article. Many journalists worked for weeks to produce one decent piece. Then I found out that Manu had written around 1,500 posts in a single year, while also writing for other blogs. I was astonished, not only by the number but by the production pressure behind it. The need to keep publishing, without stopping, as much as possible. Do not misunderstand me. There were periods when I published more than four posts a day. I also went through my phase as a reporter of things. When I read those posts again, many of them make very little sense. I was probably telling everyone to go look at something because I did not have enough time to sit down and develop a proper chain of thought. If a journalist needs weeks to write one good story, how can we expect the blogosphere to become anything other than a torrential downpour of tiny posts with very little of the blogger left inside them?

Everything becomes the same entry: three lines mentioning something, accompanied by a photograph the writer did not pay for and probably did not take. There is no time to investigate, no money for resources, and often no interest in whether the original creator minds.

It is the kingdom of cut and paste.

The machine needs another post, so the driver keeps going.

Driver, stop please.