899 Revenge of the Blog People

"The tail" is the 95-99 percent of blogs that are not giant traffic getters, according to Hugh Hewitt's book, Blog (2005). That's me. I'm in the tail--there are millions of us in the tail. I get about 70-80 hits a day on this blog, and 10-20 on my other four blogs. The one in the group blog, LISNews.com, may get more hits than all of them because there is sort of a "bound with" audience there. The top ten bloggers may get millions of visitors. More people will read them, more librarians will read them, than will ever read Michael Gorman. See! You don't have a clue who he is, do you? (Unless you too are a librarian). He doesn't have a blog. He's pouting. Yes. Pouting and saying blogs don't matter. People who see their name in print on a somewhat regular basis just hate it when others pass them by on the other side.

Conservator, a librarian blogger says: “Nine months before Michael Gorman sneered at blogs and bloggers in an opinion piece in Library Journal, Rory Litwin sneered at blogs and bloggers in an essay in his online journal, Library Juice.”

Shows you how much I know! I thought Rory Litwin was a blogger. He can call his screed an e-zine if he wants just because it has enumeration, but mine has numbering too. A blog is just a contemporary "commonplace book," something people in earlier centuries enjoyed. Collecting and annotating on the Internet. It is thinking out loud and watching to see who catches on and wants to share in the discussion. It's done a lot for research and writing skills, even for children and teens. But I admit, I only glanced at Litwin's a long time ago (because it’s gone over the left edge of common sense and is of little value to the library world or my world.)

Where was I? Oh yes. Michael Gorman. He wrote about the wrath of the "Blog People" attempting to drag him into century 21 because of his op-ed piece in the LA Times in December, 2004: (although most librarian bloggers are liberal, he'd apparently only seen conservative blogs): "It is obvious that the Blog People read what they want to read rather than what is in front of them and judge me to be wrong on the basis of what they think rather than what I actually wrote. Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable."